Raspberry Pi's Raspbian OS Finally Spins 64-bit Version

[coder]

The Pi 3 (and certainly 4) are already ready for prime time desktop. They are more powerful than most Windows XP machines that people still managed to do incredible things with. People just need to change their habits a bit more and adapt to the hardware they want to use.

The web changed, as have browsers. People forget this, but web apps are much richer and the amount of code compiled and linked into browsers probably rivals that of the host OS.

[coder]

The MT8173 outperforms the Pi 4 even when the Pi is overclocked. Software limitations or the weird Broadcom VideoCore GPU are probably to blame.

Can you get it on any SBCs? Cost? What power dissipation like? I see it's also made at 28 nm, so it's not likely to be any more power-efficient than the Pi 4.

Pi 5 will probably be considered adequate for desktop use unless something like the GPU holds it back.

Well, we don't know that. It's almost certainly going to be another 28 nm chip, which means it's probably not going with a much more powerful CPU cluster. I think they're most likely to focus on the GPU and/or a dedicated NPU block. I hope they just beef up the GPU, so it can do double-duty.

[mangeek]

The Pi 3 (and certainly 4) are already ready for prime time desktop. They are more powerful than most Windows XP machines that people still managed to do incredible things with. People just need to change their habits a bit more and adapt to the hardware they want to use.

Except that's not how things work. A machine with circa-2008 horsepower today can't play full screen streaming video on the web, and takes several seconds to load web pages. It's not just bloaty software, it's an entire ecosystem that's sized for the computing power that's available to it, and it's never going to move backwards. I don't want to go back to blocky 1 megapixel displays, low-strength encryption, buffering MPEG2 video, and browsing that struggled with basic CSS.

[rclark]

The Raspberry Pi product line has earned my loyalty as a customer,

My loyalty too. From day one when the first PI was released it has opened up a whole new world for automating things and doing things at a reasonable price. With a full OS onboard, lots of memory, and GPIO and I2C, SPI, etc.... the possibilities are end-less. My last two wants were answered when USB 3.0 and Gigabyte ethernet was made available. Looking around my work area, not one of my RPIs has a monitor/keyboard/mouse hooked up. I run them all headless. VLC? YouTube? Web Browsing? FreeCad? Photo/video editing? I have powerful desktops available for those applications.

[esbeeb]

I, for one, am grateful that the Raspberry Pi Foundation did all this work to get an all-around decent 64-bit OS released whatsoever, even if there are warts. For the price point (granted you can actually get one), the warts are forgivable. IMHO, they go much farther, in this regard, than any other ARM SBC maker. So big is this disparity, to my eye, that I have zero interest in any other ARM SBC maker.

The Raspberry Pi product line has earned my loyalty as a customer, even though not every decision they make is a nerd-perfect one.

If they screw up too badly in the future, this loyalty will be revoked, of course.

[rclark]

anyone knows if 64bit mode exposes more general purpose registers?!

Yes. 32 bit has 16, 64 bit has 32. Actually only 31 general purpose, as X31 is the Stack Pointer (SP) which is restricted to just certain instructions to use.

Unlike Intel/AMD you can't split the registers. Ie. say you are working with 32bit numbers, you don't have a WH0 and a WL0. You just have W0 (treat as 32bit) or X0 (treat as 64bit) -- both being the same register.

Here is helpful guide for AARCH64: https://modexp.wordpress.com/2018/10...bly/#registers

[arQon]

Don't know about h265, but I've used Void Linux & Kodi on the original Pi. Works just fine. Are they using Raspbian kernels?

Ah. In that case, the piece that's confusing you is "on the original Pi". The Pi4 has no "working" access to the VideoCore block other than through MMAL (32-bit only, "custom" API, requires custom non-mainlined code to work at all), or, potentially / theoretically V4L (currently mostly-broken, poorly implemented, and with several key patches still missing from ffmpeg master).

Raspbian has historically provided "working" accel on the Pi4 through MMAL, which like I say requires a VERY-custom VLC+ffmpeg build, and obviously means that any other player simply doesn't work, because the few people involved have long since run out of patience trying to manage to massive patchsets. (There were significant other issues as well, like ffmpeg only supporting a single nvidia-specific format for V4L at all, and taking over a year to acknowledge RPF's patches. I *think* ffmpeg master now also has some ARM64 code for colorspace / format conversion too, which was also missing, but I've given up on this mess too after years of watching it go nowhere).

The fact that *only* VLC has accel in this new release makes it clear that the infrastructure as a whole is still a total mess, and that RPF is still burning all its effort on maintaining a very custom version of a single video player (and one that's been so utterly broken on Linux since its 3.x release that it's unusable in the first place) purely so that it can continue to bend the truth about "4K video playback", rather than actually make progress on anything resembling a standard API, or even a version of the ffmpeg libs with accel support. SOME of that isn't RPF's fault, c.f. the ffmpeg devs simply ignoring RPF's pull requests for as long as they did, but for the most part they just don't have any idea what they "SHOULD" be doing, so instead of that they're wasting staggering amounts of engineering time just to end up with the worst possible "working" outcome, with constant Chrome rebasing alone apparently taking more than half of their total development bandwidth.

I haven't tried this release yet, but given the specificity of how it's still *only* VLC that has accel, it's pretty clear that they're continuing to do things the worst way possible, expending a huge amount of effort just to achieve the bare minimum. Whether that's through V4L patches in VLC, or some form of thunking mechanism to make the MMAL layer available to 64-bit clients, I don't know.

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

That's a very different scenario to what OP is asking, which was "s video decoding in hardware (h.264 & h.265) working now?", and the answer to that is a solid "no", the same way it's always been, other than when running an extremely-hacked version of VLC, and only on raspbian's very-modded 32-bit kernels.

The fact that you can use a pi4 to *transcode* video, provided you DON'T have a DRM client running, isn't of any use to anyone attempting to e.g. watch YouTube on it inside a desktop session. I'm pretty sure that's the context the OP was asking about.

This!

The Pi WAS NOT running with 64 bit kernels with video decoding working in the past. I'd like to have upstream kernel, mesa & video decoding APIs/players to support that with 64bit. Not sure what's so hard to deliver this after so many years.

[waxhead]

I am not familiar with the architecture for the pi too much to know if the 64 bit mode offers more CPU registered than 32bit mode. More usable general purpose registers usually help compilers not push/pop registers to stack and can help performance in tight loops. I imagine that emulators and other programs that crunch numbers a lot can benefit if compiled as 64bit in this case so do anyone knows if 64bit mode exposes more general purpose registers?!

[kpedersen]

Pi 5 will probably be considered adequate for desktop use unless something like the GPU holds it back.

Nah, by then Gnome 3 or KDE and certainly web browsers will just be even more wasteful of resources.

The Pi 3 (and certainly 4) are already ready for prime time desktop. They are more powerful than most Windows XP machines that people still managed to do incredible things with. People just need to change their habits a bit more and adapt to the hardware they want to use.

But of course. They wont because extremely powerful machines are also dirt cheap.