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

[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]

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).

[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.

[coder111]

Ugh. Lots of people complaining. My take- I'm happy with RP4 and I'll buy the 4GB version as soon as its more widely available and software has caught up. My time is valuable. I can install LibreElec on it in 5 minutes flat, and have it playing movies (at 1080p, my TV is a bit dated) and working with the rest of my home network. Completely headache free. Maybe I'll also install RetroPie as well this time once it's ported.

If I was looking to waste hours tinkering, maybe I'd look for better bang for buck or better performance or whatnot. Or if I was building a product of which I need to ship 100k units. But I'm looking for best community support, and best open-source compatibility. And least headaches. PI has any other SBC beat on that. And I don't need to explain to my wife or my daughter why she cannot watch her cartoon or game of thrones tonight because computer is broken.

I have RPI3 currently. RPI4 is a much improved version, and has removed all the pain points I have with RPI3 (USB3, gigabit ethernet, memory, CPU speed). Maybe it would be nice to have faster GPU, SATA and second Ethernet port. But then it would not be as small, nor would it cost that little. Overall, great job from RPI foundation.

ROCKPro64 is a bit too costly (60$). It does have PCIe 4x expansion slot, which is a killer feature. At 60$, perhaps a cheap x86 motherboard would be a better choice. I'm guessing that ROCKPro64 is similar to ROCKPINE64. Also, no mainline kernel support = lots of problems.

There's also power consumption, which might make ARM boards superior to x86 hardware.

A slower CPU, slower GPU, slower RAM, bad software support and a horrible GPU driver blob that can barley do hardware video decoding?

Oh, it also has no 5GHz Wifi and both slower and less stable bluetooth. Sounds like a fantastic board, you should get it!

I think I'd pay extra for any SBC that doesn't have Broadcom chips on it, and that has superior I/O.

[Faber]

Enough with the Trumpian language guys.

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.
Just shut it down and turn it off at the switch, what's hard about that?

Right, it just means the Pi is intended for a different use case. There are a lot of other SBCs which would be better for applications such as a web server, file server, media server, etc.

[Faber]

Cool. It's nice to see more products on the market. I'm still waiting for the year of the RISC-V ATX desktop.

Like Raptor Computing's Talos II?

[coder]

Fundamentally nothing changed nor there is a increase in output regarding VC, added function's won't charge true output fact.

FWIW, there's a decent performance uplift on Quake Arena - just not as big as the intervening 7 years would lead one to hope. We'll have to see how the other GPU benchmarks look, but it doesn't seem like there's no improvement.

A72 is a big performance improvement and it is a old design.
...
Today blueprints achieve 25~30% higher output even on E1 small core's while N1 go 2x higher.
If you would like a nice ... all cherry cotton wrapped up & built on leading edge manufacturing process it would cost 500$ not 50.

Exactly. This was built to a price. Even quad-A72 is better than I expected, for the CPU cores.

I wish the GPU had been made yet wider, but upgrading the CPU cores and that video decoder block probably blew most of their silicon budget. It is still 28 nm, after all.

[t.s.]

They should consider put battery header (RTC) on rpi4