Live data from Hacker News

Raspberry Pi 4

raspberrypi.org

461–470 of 859 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gigabit Ethernet! Does it have PoE? Having to deal with one less cable would be nice. Especially given that the latest spec, IEEE 802.3bt from September 2018, now allows for up to 100W per port: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet

did they finally release the 100W spec? IEEE really let that spec languish for too long -- vendors got impatient and implemented their own. i had to write 60W PoE code supporting three different specs around 2015. bosch's design was the worst.

803.bt has been finalized AFAICT, but I'm not sure about product availability. Do a search on the spec # and you'll find results.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#462
post #411

What's the thermal story? Looks pretty terrible so far. The case has no holes. The board has no holes for the heatsink, so you'll have to glue it. Space for heatsink is small. Is it made so that the board serves as a heatsink at the very least?

The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ was the exception more than the norm. Clocking the A-53 at 1.4GHz on 40nm really sucked down the juice. The processor used in the 4 is probably not running on the very edge of its maximum potential.

As for heatsinks, you've always "glued" them, I even have a few I have permanently epoxied on instead of the included adhesive.

EDIT: I'm wrong, wrong, wrong, so wrong. https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/benchmarking-the-raspberry-pi...

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#463
post #54
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't follow. Firstly, I don't think I've seen any other SBC vendor fail to publish full schematics. This is a peculiarity of rpi's offering. Secondly, nobody is forcing them to add DRM chips to anything. That's not something that can be written off on "a contractual obligation made me do it." They did it of their own will.

Counter hypothesis because I can’t be bothered to research it fully: Pi: “Hello we wish to buy a $thing” Vendor: “Certainly. We sell $thing for ten dollars per unit if it doesn’t have DRM, or five dollars per unit if it does.”

> Vendor: “Certainly. We sell $thing for ten dollars per unit if it doesn’t have DRM, or five dollars per unit if it does.”

Hah - sounds like the "boneless vs bone-in steak" sales model - take the bone out of the steak, and suddenly it costs more per pound than it does with the bone left in. Somehow, less costs more - and people sadly pay for it.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#464
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really too bad. It makes the 4K support useless for building an HTPC, which is a common use for the Pi. As far as I can determine, several of their competitors already support 10bit decoding, although specifics (about stable HDR support) are sometimes hard to come by.

As a fifty seven year old, I don't have 4k eyeballs. agree you have a limitation, not one which is holding me back since osmc does 720p just fine, for Olde telecine mp4s of B&W movies

I suppose a future AV improvement will be to upgrade eyeballs; iSpheres anyone?

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the screen is large enough about everyone gets 4k eyeballs.

I have a 4K-capable 40 inch TV in a standard living room (for Europe). 4K videos look slightly crispier than full HD ones. While I could have a slightly larger TV, I think that for typical domestic use 4K's improvement is marginal because people are not sitting 50cm from the screen and room sizes are limited. Really, so far the top benefit has been that I could tell my wife: "Look, if I move right up to the screen I…

I've got a 4K TV and it's placed in a location that I can tell whether or not something is 4K if I sit a bit closer, but the core problem is that it's still very difficult to provide it true 4K content, since I've not been willing to drop the money for 4K blurays.

I've got a variety of content that is, technically, a video stream that decodes into a framebuffer that is a "4K" framebuffer according to the metadata on the video, but without enough bits for it to truly be "4K"; the same number of bits dedicated to a 1080P video would look just as good.

For all the bragging about how streaming is the future, it seems to me that the companies providing those streams at scale still have a lot of incentive to cut the bitrate back so far that it's not practically a 4K stream anymore, because 95%+ of their audience can't really tell.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#466

So on one hand, I get the excitement. This is a very popular platform that has a ton of community support and does a bunch of stuff. On the other hand, it isn't great at anything (besides the community - which shouldn't be underestimated, sure). It's also using a pretty proprietary chip - if you build a project off of a Pi, it's hard to migrate to a custom PCB. As a NAS, you probably would want ECC and a bunch of SAT…

I think that aside from versatility and community, the other big thing these have been great at is long term availability. Just look at how many other Pi "killers" have come and gone pretty rapidly, or never ended up getting good OS support.

I will say, I suspect that for a media box, USB3 storage may be good enough.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#467
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the 4 have a composite output, or is there a hat for it? My game room has a CRT and while I'd love to stick to original hardware, the price of getting it to read games from non-original media (which is getting harder and harder to come by) is pretty high. An RPi 4 could be reasonable alternative.

google pi2scart

But then I need two adapters, and twice the price of the Pi alone, so I guess I'm better off with just using an old computer.

PS: Though, if I ever get my hands on a decent arcade monitor this sort of thing would be wicked cool for a MAME cab.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#468
post #46

Depending on the purpose, for example if somebody just wants a compact home cloud, the Odroid HC2 could also - still - be considered: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc2-home-cloud-two/ - Half the RAM but double the cores. I'm waiting for some benchmarks to see if the RPi4 is faster and by how much. - Also Gigabit Ethernet and it works great. My downloads are always at 108-111MB/s for the whole transfer. - Not…

> compact home cloud Can we just start calling them servers again?

I think most ISPs don't allow servers on residential, so one would be better off using a home cloud. Preferably one with blockchain to disrupt blocking or throttling.

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USB 3.0 ports should give 100MB/s (Benchmarks show up to +300MB/s), and you can mirror two disks for RAID-1. With 4GB of RAM, you'd even be able to use ZFS.

With 4GB of RAM, you'd even be able to use ZFS. Does it use ECC memory? If not, you should not use ZFS. Without ECC memory, ZFS carries the nasty risk of writing good data with a bad checksum, leading to data loss which would not occur in other filesystems (those that do not try to correct errors on the fly like ZFS).

On the other hand, it carries the advantage of being able to correct bad data (or at least detect it) if it writes bad data and a good checksum, which other filesystems won't do. Seeing as the data for a check-summed block is much larger than the checksum itself, this seems like a net win as assuming a uniform probability of memory errors for each byte of memory, an error is more likely to occur in the data (though I guess it depends on the specifics of the implementation).

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

#470
Any suggestions or experiences with write-intensive applications? My SD-card fails every few months. Is there a more reliable storage option that's easy to implement?
Post reply on HN