>Something like an RPi 4 but with more disk I/O and RAM.
Have you seen the RISC-V based VisionFive2?
Uses 4x SiFive U74 cores, so it is actually between rpi3b and 4 in CPU performance, but using way less power (especially idle).
The SoC has an industrial operating range: It can go up to 125C, it doesn't use or need a heatsink; at full load in human room temperatures it won't even reach 70C.
GPU performance is supposedly 4x that of RPi4. As for I/O, it has 2x GbE and a M.2 slot, besides USB3 and a RPi-like GPIO header.
4GB and 8GB versions are available, but 8GB won't ship until February. Both versions are <$100.
> If anyone has development experience using the raspberry pi 4 (4GB), I really want to hear from you, especially regarding the processor performance
I've been developing on the platform for a few months now. Though it's difficult to compare performance between architectures, the new BCM2711 compares favorably in CPU bound tasks to Intel's Cherry Trail Atoms from early 2016, primarily the Atom x5-z8350.
The Pi 4 also overclocks easily from 1.5 GHz to 2.0 - 2.1 GHz, where it exceeds Atom performance in some cases. The A72 cores are a huge leap in performance compared to the A53 cores of the RPi 3. These are architecturally "big" cores, as compared to the more power efficient and lower throughput "little" A53 cores of the previous model.
This SoC is far more efficient, using just 4.4w on full load and achieving some 80% of rpi4's cpu performance at a much lower power, with no need for a heatsink.
> In addition, its processor includes two 200-MHz microcontrollers that allow you to implement low-latency, real-time functions while still having the capabilities of a Linux system.
This is brilliant. Inter-processor communication [1] feels quite like programming GPGPU. I wish there was a way to allow one of RPi's VideoCore unit to access external IO.
VisonFive 2 is a decent amount faster than a RPi4.
And there was a floodgate opened for high perf core announcements at the recent RISC-V summit. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ventana-risc-v-cpus-beating-n... Most of those are probably bullshiting some major aspect of their cores' perf but there's designs like from from Jim Keller's Tenstorrent too. Jim Keller is sort of known for not bullshitting.
Honestly, the StarFive VisionFive 2 RISC-V based board is approaching, or maybe even beyond that reality. It is only slightly more expensive than the Pi 4, is almost just as fast, has way more IO options, is completely open source, and has Ubuntu support coming soon, Debian, etc. I preordered one after the kickstarter, so I guess I'll see how it adds up. I will try to add my thoughts here when I receive it.
> * Don't underestimate the number of services you can having running in containers on a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM, sipping just 2.1W (yes, that little!) at idle over PoE or as low as 1.35W over WiFi powered by USB-C. With distributions like DietPi you can have a mere 10 processes at startup (using just 44MiB of RAM), but still all the flexibility in the world.
I've been disappointed in the general reliability, terrible IO, and heat/power of the RPI4. I'm getting rid of them in favor of second hand thin clients.
> It's not too far fetched, they're not very different at all, they're both quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit based SOCs with similar clock speeds, and the some of the Pine boards with more RAM can run Win10.
And Microsoft themselves were interested in the Pi (for IoT Core), so they even have some support for weird Broadcom hardware in the NT kernel.
If someone writes ACPI tables for Allwinner SoCs, it will work :)
> more closed than RPi due to the AllWinner SOCs they use
Allwinner has the most community support out of all SoCs there are. It is reverse engineered of course, but it's really good. To the point of someone writing a FOSS driver for the video decoder: https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus — the RPi still only has blobs for video acceleration. The GPU situation is a bit reversed: VC4 is well established and maintained by Broadcom, while Panfrost and Lima are still pretty young.
It would be very incorrect to suggest that anything is more closed than the old garbage SoC that's in the RPi. It starts booting from the GPU (!) and it has a custom Broadcom exclusive interrupt controller instead of ARM GIC (!!). The author of the open GPU side firmware for the Pi literally suggested Allwinner (sunxi) as a better alternative:
https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/37#is...
But Rockchip of course a much better company because they themselves work with upstream Linux.
> Yeah, as soon as I heard about the 5 needing cooling for most tasks I went ahead and got a 8GB Pi 4.
You heard wrong, then.
"For normal usage of your Raspberry Pi, adding cooling is entirely optional. The idle performance of a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Raspberry Pi 5 is about the same, and under typical loads Raspberry Pi 5 will run cooler than a similarly loaded Raspberry Pi 4."
"even when fully throttled, a Raspberry Pi 5 is still going to run faster than a Raspberry Pi 4!"
A Pi 5 has a higher performance ceiling than the Pi 4 when passively cooled, and an even higher one with active cooling. The Pi 5 does not need cooling for most tasks.
>"Future Raspberry Pi board may be able to take advantage of the higher video resolution and framerate enabled by the new camera module."
This is interesting, the community it's been asking for more powerful Raspberry Pi models, with more PCI lanes too. Models like that would be amazing for building NAS, routers and IoT devices
Not the pi, but the vaguely-similar (better, IMHO) https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ has a 4x pcie. Works great for a sata/raid controller, but still has plenty of "embedded" limitations - you can't just plug a graphics card into it.
> It's hilarious to realize that a Raspberry Pi 4 will run circles around it.
Is it?
The Atom 330 was released in 2008 (as one of the cheapest, weakest processors, lowest power core Intel would produce at the time). The Rasp. Pi 4 was released 11 years later, on 24 June 2019.
I bet you that the Intel Atom 330 ran circles around any chip from 1997.
Forewarning, comparing across utterly different segments of devices is bad & dangerous for the health of industries. And yet, let's dive in to just that: there's a lot more I/O than an RPi4 here! 8+4+1 PCIe 3.0 slots. Wow. If it can really use the bandwidth these slots expose that's very impressive. 4 USB ports but so few folks clarify whether that's for real or shared bandwidth under a single usb host or whether they're independent. So either an effective +1.25 or +5 extra PCIe3 slots of bandwidth there, again, if this device can saturate those links.
I'm wondering very much how the CPU fares. This is progress either way, but will it match a RPi4? The RPI4 has tiny I/O but I feel like it's probable the cpu performance is not radically unlike.
Have you seen the RISC-V based VisionFive2?
Uses 4x SiFive U74 cores, so it is actually between rpi3b and 4 in CPU performance, but using way less power (especially idle).
The SoC has an industrial operating range: It can go up to 125C, it doesn't use or need a heatsink; at full load in human room temperatures it won't even reach 70C.
GPU performance is supposedly 4x that of RPi4. As for I/O, it has 2x GbE and a M.2 slot, besides USB3 and a RPi-like GPIO header.
4GB and 8GB versions are available, but 8GB won't ship until February. Both versions are <$100.
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