Raspberry Pi 4 Announced With Dual HDMI, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, V3D Driver Stack

[coder]

Edit: well, if you need to run a computer from a battery, or to put it in a pocket, then RPi is superior to x86 today.

Apparently, you haven't seen the Power Draw Benchmark from here:

https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/benchmarking-the-raspberry-pi-4-73e5afbcd54b

Intel makes a line of desktop-derived SoCs for tablets that burn less power at idle. When they stretch their legs, they easily smoke the Pi, at not much more TDP.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/95441/intel-core-i7-7y75-processor-4m-cache-up-to-3-60-ghz.html

Of course, a glance at the list price will quickly explain why they aren't popular in Pi-class hardware. However, don't forget that the Pi is on 28 nm while Intel is on 14. And Broadcom probably couldn't afford to power-optimize it to the same degree that Intel has.

However, if it's battery power that you want, then you really should be looking to boards based on a cell phone SoC. Most mid-range and higher SoCs are on even smaller nodes.

[danmcgrew]

A lot is being written about the new Raspberry Pi's being a suitable machine for--finally-- "building a PC" (same thing was claimed for the RPi 3B+).

It might be informative to check into the specs for the upcoming $199.00 Pinebook Pro:

Rockchip RK3399 SOC with Mali T860 MP4 GPU; 4GB LPDDR4 RAM; 1080p IPS Panel; Magnesium Alloy Shell body; Bootable Micro SD Slot; 64GB of eMMC (Upgradable); PCIe x4 to m.2 NVMe SSD Slot (requires optional adapter); SPI Flash 128Mbit; HD Digital Video Out via USB-C; USB 2.0 Host; USB 3.0 Host; USB-C (Data, Power and Video out); Lithium Polymer Battery (10000mAH); Stereo Speakers; WiFi 802.11 AC + Bluetooth 4.1; Headphone Jack; Microphone; Front-Facing Camera; Choice of ISO or ANSI Keyboard; Large Trackpad; UART Access via Audio Jack; 3.5″ Barrel Power (5V 3A) Port.
Operating systems include Custom Debian (probably pre-installed), Ubuntu Mate, Ubuntu with LXDE and Chromium OS; and--within a few weeks of launch / before most end-users get their units--Manjaro KDE, KDE Neon and Armbian.

https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/

[coder]

FYI, there's an interactive Q&A session with Eben Upton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Upton) - founder & lead architect of the Raspberry Pi - going on, here:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ra...ama,39709.html

It should be open for another 24 hours.

As their forum software is a bit broken, you need to sign into the forum on a different page, such as this one:

https://forums.tomshardware.com/

Then, navigate to the Q&A thread and post your question.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

The rock64 with 4GB ram is pretty much useless if you don't use android and trying to use linux is a crashtastic experience.

You talking about ROCK64 or PINE H64 ver. B? Which installation image, kernel, GPU driver did you use?

I testing ROCKPro64 right now, and besides two issues and Xorg crashes within Mali driver (so far happening with anything that use GPU, including Chromium, KWin and even just modesettings DDX; I hope for Panfrost here) I didn't find anything. Mali issue didn't bother me much because even with plain framebuffer Firefox can handle 720p 60 fps on YouTube without dropping frames. So far so go.

[microcode]

I've yet to see even an ARM system in a standard PC form factor (I would even accept STX, mind you).

At least with ARM, you have several major distros from which to choose. I think software support for RISC V is much further behind.

I bought a prototype of a Mini-ITX ARM workstation board that was featured a few weeks ago here on Phoronix; it should ship out in september, and the final product (with more PC peripherals) should come a bit later. the ATX form factor has many, many faults which make it annoying and cumbersome to make motherboards these days (the placement of things is really not ideal, means they have to use more layers and work harder on signal integrity for the things to function), but there's just so much compatible equipment for ATX that it's hard to justify going a different direction for workstations. Particularly the power supplies, PCIe peripherals, and to a lesser extent, the chassis.

[microcode]

Like Raptor Computing's Talos II?

Yeah. Raptor's computers are very attractive aside from the POWER ecosystem being basically IBM-only, despite the openwashing. Even with those weaknesses I'm entertaining it as an option for my next home workstation. I just got so much value from my AMD Threadripper system that I'm not sure I can move backward in terms of capabilities.

[willmore]

I'm ready to give it another try with the Pinebook Pro, but will wait for initial user reports before putting down that amount of money.

If you are looking at an SBC as well as a laptop, I would recommend the ODROID-N2. HK has a good history of making very solidly performing boards with great software support. And they don't cheap out on the heatsinks. Take a look at the HC boards, the N2, the C2, the XU4(Q), etc. No bare SoC hanging in the breeze anywhere.

[andreano]

I'm also going back to the RPi after a handful of years with other boards (bought 2 4GB cards from that last greek seller with those in stock).

To add another non-RPi anecdote here, my PicoPi iMX8M overheated when idling inside my low-profile wooden laptop case (that board had serious thermal issues even in open air with its generous heatsink). I suppose they didn't have time to implement the power saving CPU states, let alone thermal throttling. The board was otherwise stable. Let's hope Purism has better luck with that chip.

The rest of the SBC industry … is pretty much bankrupt as far as I can understand: Decent drivers beat decent hardware any day. I suppose now should be a good time to invest in manufacturers of HDMI adaptors and microSD class A1 cards.

[stargeizer]

Interesting. I own 4 such devices, a Raspberry Pi 1B (original 256 MB model), a Raspberry Pi 3B, an Orange Pi PC (with Allwinner H3), and one Mini M8S TV box (with AMLogic S905).

• The Raspberry Pi 1B which cost me 39 EUR in May 2012 is close to useless nowadays, much too slow and vc4 doesn't support devices with such low amount of RAM. Around summer of 2015 it became unstable under prolonged CPU load.
• The cheapest by far was the Orange Pi PC, it cost me 22 EUR including case + power cable + shipping via AliExpress in October 2015, and is the one which works best nowadays. It can even accelerate video decode now thanks to bootlin's sunxi-cedrus VPU support campaign.
• The Raspberry Pi 3 cost me 39 EUR in March 2016 and it works, but is sluggish even on lightweight desktops and browsers. I don't know why, but the Orange Pi PC feels much snappier for anything I do.
• The Mini M8S cost me 25€ including shipping from Gearbest in June 2016, and is the best hardware-wise (comparable to Odroid-C2), but despite linux-meson efforts to get it supported well in mainline, it is not quite usable yet.

I'm ready to give it another try with the Pinebook Pro, but will wait for initial user reports before putting down that amount of money.

Yup, the RPI3 requires some thinkering with the config.txt to make it work properly with certain hardware (usb keyboard, usb mouse, speed). Also is not just "plug and play" thing. For my needs was fantastic (albeit slow), but as i said before, i look forward to the rpi4. But as usual with ARM based machines, support will mature in the future.... the distant future.... i can't see it

[stargeizer]

Does anyone have any experience with "PINE H64 ver. B" ?

I had it.

TL;DR: NO. just... NO.

LA:
This card is slow, and support is incomplete. Audio is BUGGY AS _HE**_ (Captals letters and add led lights to the letters). KODI will have no sound, or sound will be distorted randomly and is available partially in armbian. USB ports support is poor, and expect lots of discconections from them. The eMMC has to be buyed separately. Unless you use it for anything else than multimedia (i didn't test NAS, since networking on this card is kinda unreliable, but i didn't tested that much to be honest), save yourself some hair and look elsewhere. Didn't test on android, since i never got an image for it. Don't know if one exists. (I ended put it in the trash bin in a ragequit attack)

At this point, i believe that most ARM hardware are only supported on android, and only partially on a what are the minimum rquirements on android, rather than a general purpose thinkering machine.