New Libre-Focused ARM Board Aims To Compete With Raspberry Pi 3, Offers 4K

[pal666]

???

Mali is not "video card" it is "3D accelerator". Mali is 3D only, while 2D components and video decoding works through open drivers support as it is dealt by other parts. For embedded devices 3D can be sacrificed more easily than for a laptop.

first, nobody needs 4k "video card" without "3D accelerator" in 2017
second, contrary to your fantasies, they do mention 3d acceleration, i.e. do false advertising

Key Features

Le Potato is powered by quad 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores along with a ARM Mali-450 GPU with 2 geometry and 3 pixel cores


Industry Standards

• OpenGL ES 2.0

[pal666]

Nope. 3D isn't required for most embedded projects.

nope. if your embedded project requires 4k, it does require 3d

[pal666]

My 486DX could run C&C Red Alert, Steel Panthers, Civilization, Settlers 2 etc. Most games used 320x200x8b (mode 13h), some 640x480x8b.

4k is 130 times larger than 320x200, and this is without factoring in bit depth, which will make it more than .5k times larger

[stefansaraev]

nope. if your embedded project requires 4k, it does require 3d

you serious?

[caligula]

4k is 130 times larger than 320x200, and this is without factoring in bit depth, which will make it more than .5k times larger

Yes, but 4 cores x 1200 MHz is with LPDDR3 is also a bit faster than 66 MHz 486 with EDO RAM. Many of the 320x200 games were often playable on 33 MHz 486SX. E.g. Doom. Settlers 2 used 640x480 or even higher res.

I kind of doubt anyone would use the 4k mode for desktop. It's mainly for the video playpack. Even some Rpi distros like OpenELEC might default to 720p for the GUI and 1080p for the video. It just can't handle such modes even with GPU acceleration.

[mulenmar]

You mean this?

...*facepalm* Yes, that is it, thank you! I was looking in the wrong IRC, it seems.

[mulenmar]

Yes, but 4 cores x 1200 MHz is with LPDDR3 is also a bit faster than 66 MHz 486 with EDO RAM. Many of the 320x200 games were often playable on 33 MHz 486SX. E.g. Doom. Settlers 2 used 640x480 or even higher res.

There's something like a couple orders of magnitude difference in how much memory and bandwidth is necessary to shuffle ((320 * 200 * 8bpp) / 32bits-per-byte) = 15.625 KiB, multiplied by 2 for double-buffering, out to a display at 20FPS... and how much is needed to shuffle ((3840 * 2160 * 24bpp) / 32bits-per-byte) = 6.075 MiB, multiplied by 2 for double-buffering or 3 for triple-buffering, out to a display at 60FPS or, worse, higher.

That wasn't even counting the CPU/GPU/memory bandwidth requirements needed for loading and decoding, nor the computational requirements, just the framebuffer size.

There are limits to how much computational power and bandwidth one can cram into a US$30 embedded board's CPU. As such, it HAS to use the dedicated decoding hardware at even 720p, let alone 1080p. I doubt said hardware is capable of keeping up above that with anything but the lowest-power codecs (like MPEG1/2), and I further doubt it could handle even that at 4k resolutions.

[squash]

I made a list a while back of the things a Pi competitor would have to have in order for the community to embrace it at the same level. Thus far, I'm not aware of any attempt to hit the target.

I can't find it at the moment but I can summarize.. Any board that doesn't actually improve in an area the Pi is lacking is doomed. There are lots of places to improve on the Pi. Simple things, like a real power connector instead of micro usb. SATA (or even USB3) interface for connecting real storage instead of these god-awful slow emmc/sd nonsense. Multiple USB (buses is the B so Multiple USB is correct when you want more than one bus) so that your network interface and your storage interface aren't competing for a lane that either of them could saturate..

What we get instead is different brand SoC, maybe a gig-e port still running on usb2, and various video chipsets that manage to be even worse supported than videocore.

[caligula]

That wasn't even counting the CPU/GPU/memory bandwidth requirements needed for loading and decoding, nor the computational requirements, just the framebuffer size.

There are limits to how much computational power and bandwidth one can cram into a US$30 embedded board's CPU.

Of course there are limits. Graphics processing is better off delegated to a dedicated chip IP anyways. It doesn't need to be a 3d accelerator.

I originally only replied to 'Nope. 3D isn't required for most embedded projects.' I'm not sure why the 4k graphics discussion started again. The truth is, quite many embedded boards DO NOT use 3D graphics, no OpenGL, no Direct3D, no OpenGL ES, no Vulkan. There. Go buy a $200 washing machine - does it run OpenGL 4.5 or Vulkan? I'm pretty sure it does not. Looking at smart watches, the best ones have a resolution of around 400x400x24b. Of course THERE ARE appliances that actually use 3D accelerated graphics, but then again some of those appliances don't need that much power. For instance, the touch screen you use to pay your groceries does not require smooth 60 fps 3D HDR VR graphics. It could even work without a double buffer @ 0.5 FPS and nobody would give a flying f*ck. In fact, I would guess that this is exactly how it works.

Having a machine capable of 4k display output does not imply that all graphics must be 4k, 3D, HiDPI, stereoscopic, VR, HDR, AND triple buffered. In fact if you bought a RPi form factor board, you would have hard time even buying a compatible, portable 4k display for a specific project. I only pointed out that you could indeed have playable, relatively high resolution graphics even on the early 1990s machines. What's wrong with that graphics now? If the machines are 100 times faster now, why isn't it enough to make the graphics 100 times better?

Btw, I checked the specs. So, it seems the memory bandwidth has grown 100-fold (single channel). Dual channel is common even on SBCs. CPU speed is enormously faster. Two DDR4 modules can transfer up to 50 GB/s. 1920x1080x24b @ 50 fps requires 600 MB worth of reading and 300 MB worth of writing per frame, assuming double buffering and a shared RAM for the frame buffer. So, that's less than 2% of the memory bandwidth. Even 4k @ 60 fps would use less than 10% of the bandwidth. You could certainly improve this without resorting to a 3d accelerator. It's already braindead to begin with normal DDR for these kinds of aggregate memory operations when super wide GDDR exists.

As such, it HAS to use the dedicated decoding hardware at even 720p, let alone 1080p. I doubt said hardware is capable of keeping up above that with anything but the lowest-power codecs (like MPEG1/2), and I further doubt it could handle even that at 4k resolutions.

Right, but video decoding is totally different. Video decoding uses fixed function pipelines / DSP / GPGPU code, whereas only the graphics requires Mali 3d acceleration. The Mali issue has nothing to do with video playback unless we talk about GUI layers on top of the video. Accelerated video playback is normal practice everywhere. All GPUs, APUs, most SBCs and desktop CPUs support it. It's also a lot easier to implement as you just push this stream through the vendor API and everything just works. Video engines of many boards have already been reverse engineered with little effort, Mali 3d graphics seems like a dead end.

[caligula]

I made a list a while back of the things a Pi competitor would have to have in order for the community to embrace it at the same level. Thus far, I'm not aware of any attempt to hit the target.

I can't find it at the moment but I can summarize.. Any board that doesn't actually improve in an area the Pi is lacking is doomed. There are lots of places to improve on the Pi. Simple things, like a real power connector instead of micro usb. SATA (or even USB3) interface for connecting real storage instead of these god-awful slow emmc/sd nonsense. Multiple USB (buses is the B so Multiple USB is correct when you want more than one bus) so that your network interface and your storage interface aren't competing for a lane that either of them could saturate..

What we get instead is different brand SoC, maybe a gig-e port still running on usb2, and various video chipsets that manage to be even worse supported than videocore.

Your list is outdated. The competitors already do all that. The GPU is the only obstacle. If you don't care about a bigger power budget, there are already few x86 boards that even do (3D) graphics. There are multiple UP board variants, UDOO X86, ... If you want RPi3 perf on an IoT board, the new NanoPi Neo 2+ does all that. If you have a tight budget, the Orange Pi boards are dirt cheap. E.g. OPI PC2 is half the price of RPi3 but has like 10 times the I/O bandwidth.