Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Launches As Newer, Faster $10 Single Board Computer

[rclark]

For my little applications (or even a big one) that will run on the board, 512M of ram is more than enough. Might say 'swimming' in RAM. This aren't meant to run a development workstation... Mine all run headless too. If you need more power/ram, go with the standard RPI4 or CM4 and pay the fiddler. For the small form factor and price $10-$15 computer what more could you ask for. We are spoiled rotten with the hardware available today. Only concern I have is the power consumption probably went up with the new board. Back in 80s/90s we automated power plants and substations with computers (z-80s, 68000s) with less (way less in the beginning) than 1M of RAM and CPU speeds topped out at 25Mhz at the time.

[coder]

I assume the default configuration will ship with a 32-bit OS (or at least a 32-bit userland), as is still done on the Raspberry Pi 4 IIRC.

Within the life of this product, I fully expect the default will switch over to 64-bit. Once the first two generations of Pi's reach the end of their support window, it'd make sense for them to switch (if not before!).

[slacka]

Yeah, especially since going to 64-bit does use more memory.

Yes, some quick profiling revealed that my 1GB Pi 4 was thrashing with several emulators under RetroArch. Fortunately, the 32-bit OS's for Pi 3 also work on Pi 4. The extra 20% headroom that running in 32-bit mode bought me is enough prevent swapping. While the average FPS is a few percent slower, it's well worth it to avoid the jank/stutter I observed with when swapping.

It's too bad X32 ABI never took off. A version of this for ARM64 would greatly benefit all those 1-4 GB Pi 4's (or any 1-4 GB SoCs out there.) With Power, MIPS64, and SPARC64 you could run 32-bit userspaces with 64-bit kernels to gain access to the best of both worlds. It's too bad ARM egineerers didn't seem to foresee this current situation of ARM64 SOCs. It's not like they were unware of the huge memory saving's that Thumb affords.

[blackshard]

Yeah, especially since going to 64-bit does use more memory.

You can still use 32-bit userland; for such low amount of ram it is sensible.

I wonder if anyone can comment on the prospect of getting an 8 Gbit LPDDR2 chip, in the future. Do RAM makers ever upgrade old tech like that?

I guess that the answer is yes, since they are going to support the thing up to 2028. Plus this is a "special" SoC, since the only PoP SoCs were the older Armv6 BCM2835.

[blackshard]

It is a pity that they are using BCM2710 SoC instead of BCM2837 as in the RPI3.

Actually, they are pretty the same: https://www.raspberrypi.com/document...rocessors.html
I guess BCM2710A1 just carries the DRAM on top.

[sinepgib]

It's too bad X32 ABI never took off. A version of this for ARM64 would greatly benefit all those 1-4 GB Pi 4's (or any 1-4 GB SoCs out there.)

Yeah, I was truly hyped about that, more for x86 really. I have a few old x86_64 machines that don't support more than 4GB and would benefit.
The support does still exist tho, right? It's just it never took off for distros. Or maybe I'm mistaken about that?

[sinepgib]

You can still use 32-bit userland; for such low amount of ram it is sensible.

Yes, but there are things like not using the extra registers (I'm talking about x86_64 here, I have no idea about ARM), specially for argument passing, assuming some extensions are missing, etc. There are some concrete advantages you get by being aware the processor is the 64 bits variant.

[willmore]

Is the availability of these going to be better than the other Zero boards? I never ended up getting either of those as sellers limit purchases to 1 per order and charge crazy shipping. Must be nice to live near a Microcenter.

[jaxa]

Wait for the Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W with 2 GB RAM.

Is the availability of these going to be better than the other Zero boards? I never ended up getting either of those as sellers limit purchases to 1 per order and charge crazy shipping. Must be nice to live near a Microcenter.

Availability will be limited.

[skeevy420]

Yeah, I was truly hyped about that, more for x86 really. I have a few old x86_64 machines that don't support more than 4GB and would benefit.
The support does still exist tho, right? It's just it never took off for distros. Or maybe I'm mistaken about that?

I know that Gentoo still has x32 builds for x86_64.