Raspberry Pi 4 set to drive low-cost digital transformation
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asder
you uploaded the rpi3+ pic tho... ;(
Evildead666
I'm so happy i ordered two Odroid N2's from Korea on Sunday and then found this out yesterday afternoon...
Still got a pi4 2GB to eventually replace the Pi3B in my Kodi box.
The Pi4B also has an 512KB of SPI Flash to boot from, but its not usable yet.
The Odroid N2 has 4MB of SPI Flash (Hoping to get one to boot to command line, like the Amiga's and MSX's of old 🙂)
The thing with the Pi4 is that the community behind it is so large, that the development will take weeks rather than months or more for less popular boards/brands.
With this one though, a Quad A72 is pretty damn powerful, and puts nearly all the other SBC's to shame.
The extra memory up to 4GB is also very high (when it is available).
(The one big upgrade on the N2 is the audio is 32bit/384kHz on-board, whereas the Pi would probably still need a pHat, and that will cover the cpu, and mean a smaller heatsink.)
Silva
This was one of the greatest inventions of the last decades. You can build anything with these tiny pocket computers.
Although the power didn't allow for much, these new updated chips open doors for more complex projects and uses.
Evildead666
I'd have thought there would have been a lot more interest from people here....
The Pi series was the beginning of an era, and has brought huge leaps in processing power.
The massive community is what makes it though.
Asus has the Tinkerboard, and quite frankly no one is doing much with it.
Lack of community spirit lol.
The 4GB Pi4 should be fine for anyone looking for just a PC to use for daily tasks, email and web and such.
ie, My Parents are probably going to get given one of these to replace the Athlon X2 ITX setup they have.
After a while on this, they should be ready for a Laptop reinstall with Ubuntu 🙂
(The 4GB Pi4's seem to not be in stock yet).
theoneofgod
Lovely jubbly. The 4GB looks very interesting to me. The CPU performance looks great, and tHEVC 4:4:4 10 profile 5.1, HDR, all that good stuff. I just wish they included a small portion of eMMC.
XP-200
I keep meaning to grab a Pi and stick my copy of Amiga forever onto it, i would love a little Amiga emulator like that just to plug into the Tv and enjoy.
schmidtbag
Most people here are afraid to venture beyond Windows 7 and primarily only care about gaming. The RPis are kinda a step in the wrong direction for them.
Actually, the Pi series has traditionally been pretty far behind in processing power. Even this 4th generation is a bit late to the party, since there are several platforms (Jetson, PINE64, ODROID, etc) that have had equal or better CPUs already on the market.
The Tinkerboard is an overpriced RPi knockoff based on a chip with poor driver support. If you can do without the traditional RPi form factor, you can squeeze more use out of the CPU it shipped with, such as the Firefly-RK3288 (granted, that platform is even more expensive).
But yeah, the lack of a community really made it lose interest much faster
Yup definitely. It's worth pointing out that ARM is less memory intensive than x86, so 4GB goes a lot farther than some may think. Linux is also much lighter on RAM than Windows.
Funny thing is I'm sure the Pi4 by itself uses less power under full load than just the chipset alone in their current PC.
fredgml7
I'm pretty satisfied with my Raspberry Pi 3, but this one looks impressive. It's good to see improvements like that.
Raspberry Pi boards are amazing, many possibilities. I have two SD cards (I prefer this way), one with Raspbian+Kodi and other with RetroPie.:D
Hilbert Hagedoorn
Administrator
Ah, fixed 😉
Evildead666
Yes, I've been looking at the other boards for quite some time, before finally pulling the plug sunday and getting a couple of N2's. they are more powerful than the Pi4, but not an outright knock out.
One of the stings, is the cost of some of these boards, and then the completely woeful support afterwards.
With the Pi4, it doesn't cost an arm and a let, so can almost be bought on a whim.
Also, the community behind it, is just incomparable to any other board, no matter what the price or brand.
With the TinkerBoard, I was hoping with a large company like ASUS behind it, they could have some clout getting drivers and such working, but they didn't.
Some bits work, a lot doesn't.
As for Linux memory usage, yeah, its fine, then I run either Chromium of Firefox, and thats almost 1GB gone. A few tabs, or a Youtube video, and its hitting its limits.
2GB on the Pine64 or the Tinkerboard was usable, but not enough. The Pi3 at 1GB was just terrible in comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ARMv8-A_cores
A Wiki showing some of the differences between the different ARM cores, for anyone who wants to know 😉
Evildead666
Not sure if they've done anything to the audio portion of the chip though.
You would expect it to be, as everything else has been upgraded.
Might still need a HifiBerry for great sound though...
(Going from onboard sound to Hifiberry DAC+ was a HUGE difference)
schmidtbag
I agree - the differences aren't too drastic, but like you said, the support is a crucial aspect to consider. Pretty much the reason to pick a RPi over anything else is the community, and the various accessories built around its form factor.
Yeah, I don't really understand why Asus made it in the first place. The market is already saturated with Rockchip CPUs and RPi knockoffs, and Asus is notorious for crap Linux support. You'd think being such a large motherboard and AIB manufacturer that they could've made a product to undercut everyone else, but they didn't.
Yeah, I personally wouldn't go lower than 4GB on an ARMv8 CPU for everyday use. I have several ARM boards with only 1 or 2 GB but that's plenty of memory when you're running more application-specific things, rather than desktop use.
pato
Also looking forward to it.
Things to note, compared to the Pi3:
- driver support currently is lacking (GPU acceleration isn't working in most applications yet, for example in browsers)
- SD card bus is now twice as fast (I think 50 Mbit/s instead of 25 Mbit/s)
- USB3 port can now finally deliver USB3 speeds
- 1 Gbps port offers true 1 Gbps transfer speeds!!!
- a tad more power hungry, a 5V 3A power supply is recommended as minimum (although without any USB devices or HATs it should work with 2.5A too)
- no 64 bit kernel yet
- CPU throttles after ~5 - 10 minutes of high load, heatsinks or fan is recommended for desktop usage (browsing creates a lot of CPU load, for example)
- old cases aren't compatible
- power plug is now USB Type-C, not anymore Micro-USB
Don't forget to recycle your old RPi. The only negative thing with those mini computers that I see is the additional electronic waste that they create. How many of us have some old, maybe 1 year half-heartedly used RPis at home that are close to being just waste 🙁
Evildead666
There are plenty of projects you can do with older Pi's 😉
Also, instead of recycling it, why not donate it to a school or something ?
They could surely use it to teach some kids.
schmidtbag
I strongly agree with all of this. Even the original Pi still has practical uses. It's basically a superpowered Arduino, and you don't hear too many people on the Arduino forums complaining about a 16MHz 8-bit CPU with 2KB of RAM.
RealNC
It's amazing what you can do with a $35 computer now. I have zero use for it, and yet I want one... :P
holler
Does Pi-Hole work with these yet? or do I still need to get the older one?
As a sidenote, its kinda of annoying it has two mini hdmi. Its hard to find mini hdmi cables and adapters are kludgy imho... should be one regular and one mini imho.
pato
The interest in schools here is close to zero, because the teachers lack the knowledge, don't have "approved" learning material and don't know what. So yeah, if not needed, try to gift/sell it or recycle.
pato
Should probably work, although the distribution is still in beta. I'd wait some weeks until the Pi-Hole devs had time to look at the new distribution and maybe add some patches.
Evildead666
Raspberry have the cables on their site for sale.
They developed the Pi4 and then saw there was no real cable, so had that done too, and the USB-C power supply as well.
I bought the official power supply, but have not got the cables yet.
It will take a couple of weeks for the devs to get their heads around the new pi4, it was a bit of a bloody surprise 😉
There is also quite a lot of functionality that will not be available for a few weeks/months, until fully functional firmwares are done.
Frankly, Pi4 is a huge leap forward.
CPU's going from In-Order to Out of Order, triple issue, much more RAM....the new VideoCore VI GPU.
Even the first few benches won't be indicative of what it will be like when its fully functional.
