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

[danmcgrew]

@ 73--"Raspberry Pi's shutdown procedure is like every other single board computer's shutdown procedure. If don't like ARM hardware that's totally fine, but to pretend like Raspberry Pi is somehow different in this regard is totally laughable to me. It sounds more like you have an ax to grind than other people being fans."
"Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, and then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."

@ 78--"Enough with the Trumpian language guys. [see above quotation; sometimes Trumpian language (e.g., "****"), is all you understand.]
If the lack of eMMC (or alternatively, the (apparent) current lack of support for booting from a USB3 SSD) is such a problem, they obviously you will be looking at another SBC.
That does not make this Pi "a worthless piece of ****" in any way. I could understand that argument for previous Pis, but this one appears to resolve most of the issues they had. [Oh; so you agree: all previous RPis WERE worthless pieces of ****?]
Just shut it down and turn it off at the switch, what's hard about that?"
*********************************
"...I could understand that argument for previous Pis..." --but you couldn't, or wouldn't, understand that argument last year, fanboy. TYPICAL Raspberry Pi fanboy response...

Trying to objectively tell a Raspberry Pi fanboy about the shortcomings of the Pi is like "...casting pearls before swine...", or "...before jerks..."


"I well understand the esteemed gentleman's desire to speak on...he needs the practice badly."--Sir Winston Churchill

"I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence."--William F. Buckley, Jr.

[stargeizer]

Having own (and still own) the odriod-XU4, the Rock64, and the rpi 3, i have to say the better supported of the 3 is the rpi3.

- The rock64 with 4GB ram is pretty much useless if you don't use android and trying to use linux is a crashtastic experience. For a NAS can be good tho ,albeit kinda slow, and not particularly stable, but you can use it headless. It can be used as a Multimedia center, but there's still noticeable artifacts and vsync is not good on this board. i thought my board was defective, so i RMA'ed, got a new one and the problems are still there. For emulators, you need to attach a fan, and change that sd-card to retropie (Desktop or Game station, not both at the same time). Android support is better, but no good emulators on it.

- The Xu4 is good to with android, linux is so-so, but overall far better experience than the rock64. It's USB ports are slow, networking is slow, and is not a machine to thinker with. Is more like a smartphone class machine, except it doesn't have wireless support in the board. Not for the faint of heart, but shines as a Media center.

- The Rpi3 is slower, but hardly have any crash on this machine. Linux works quite ok, Videos plays OK, emulation is good, thinkering with it is also good (well, an on/off button could have been a good adition, but since i put one using the gpio, no problems on my side with this). For a NAS is slow (but far stable than the other 2 boards), but expected since supports only usb 2.0 but it's built-in wireless support is killer here, so no complains here.

No chioce is perfect, but since the RPI3 has proven to be a better bet (IN MY CASE) than the other 2 more expensives SBC's, i'm really looking forward to buy a RPI4. Maybe this time i can have that better and stable box that the competition still can't deliver (or at least, can't deliver to me).

[chithanh]

Having own (and still own) the odriod-XU4, the Rock64, and the rpi 3, i have to say the better supported of the 3 is the rpi3.

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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.