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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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?!

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture

• ARMv7-A has 15 × 32-bit integer registers; optionally, up to 32 × 64-bit registers, SIMD/floating-point
• ARMv8-A has 31 × 64-bit integer registers; guaranteed, 32 × 128-bit registers for scalar 32- and 64-bit FP or SIMD FP or integer; or cryptography

Guaranteed FP & SIMD support is a big point in favor of AArch64. That brings it level with x86-64, which incorporates up to SSE2 (also 128-bit) in the base specification.

ARMv9-A guarantees SVE2, which is one of its more appealing features. Otherwise, it's not nearly as big of a jump as between v7 and v8. SVE2 is a minimum of 128-bit. Fujitsu's HPC processor implemented it at 512-bit, but ARM's HPC-oriented Neoverse V1 implements only 256-bit. Their upcoming Neoverse N2 will implement at only 128-bit.

[caligula]

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).

Ok, makes sense now. I've only used the 32-bit RPis as video players. Nowadays I need 60 Hz 4K, so RPi won't deliver.

[caligula]

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.

Indeed some SPA pages download 30 MB of program code. Only 5 binaries in my /bin are larger than that.

[caligula]

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.

Geforce has supported H264 1080p video since 2004 (Geforce GT 6600), IIRC. Even a single core 700 MHz RPi from 2012 supports 1080p H264. I remember watching XvMC MPEG2 in 2002 or so.

[mangeek]

Even a single core 700 MHz RPi from 2012 supports 1080p H264. I remember watching XvMC MPEG2 in 2002 or so.

Right, but try handing a Raspberry Pi or a similarly-powered PC to a casual user as a daily driver for browsing/gsuite/YouTube, it's just not enough horsepower. Typical newspaper sites with ads absolutely crush it, and YouTube is a slideshow. None of that is going backwards to cater to last decade's compute requirements, and that's not a 'local bloaty software' kind of problem.

I say this as a Pi lover. I use Pis every day for stuff they're good at, but I think we have to stop fantasizing about their potential and blaming 'bloat' for why they're not snappy and fun for day-to-day use. They have the horsepower of a six year-old midrange smartphone, it's two generations behind what would be 'pleasant' for day-to-day use, regardless of software it's running.

[caligula]

Right, but try handing a Raspberry Pi or a similarly-powered PC to a casual user as a daily driver for browsing/gsuite/YouTube, it's just not enough horsepower. Typical newspaper sites with ads absolutely crush it, and YouTube is a slideshow. None of that is going backwards to cater to last decade's compute requirements, and that's not a 'local bloaty software' kind of problem.

True, but the real issue isn't the video playback. It's the heavy structure of the js/html pages. At least in theory the browser could offload video decoding and rendering to the GPU. But that wouldn't make it usable.