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8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

raspberrypi.org

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Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#51

Post by cat199 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #32
rasz wrote: post #8

Before anyone goes "OMG I could use it as a desktop" $75 is close to what you would pay for couple year old ~4 faster laptop with broken screen, sodimm and PCIE SSD slots. Quick ebay check shows things like $90 'Dell XPS12 i7-3537U 8gb 128GB SSD broken screen'

Maybe in the US. In my EU country(Austria) second hand hardware prices are through the roof. There's no way you're getting anything half decent from the last decade for $75. And then there's the cooling and power consumption difference between a 10 year old system and a RPi. It's not even close.

> In my EU country second hand hardware prices are through the roof.

Curious - any thoughts on why?

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#52

Post by Legogris »

> The BCM2711 chip that we use on Raspberry Pi 4 can address up to 16GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM, so the real barrier to our offering a larger-memory variant was the lack of an 8GB LPDDR4 package. These didn’t exist (at least in a form that we could address) in 2019, but happily our partners at Micron stepped up earlier this year with a suitable part.

All other SBCs in this market segments have also been capped at 4GB - I'm hopeful about this leading to larger memory options from other vendors as well before long.

Great of RPi to keep pushing the envelope.

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#53

Post by magicalhippo »

paines wrote: post #30
Hippocrates wrote: post #16

Does anyone know if the rPi4 can play HD (1080p) video in a browser smoothly yet? I bought one to use as a media PC after reading that it could play 4K video. Apparently it can’t even do 1080p in the browser though (YouTube etc)

Yes it can do full hd, ever since at least rPi3. Problem here is chromium. Use omxplayer and the rPi4 will do 4k in full glory. I think you can even use omxplayer with youtube somehow. Chromium doesn't even do hardware decoding on x86 desktops, you just don't notice it, because the cpu's are fast enough to do it nowadays.

> you just don't notice it, because the cpu's are fast enough to do it nowadays

On my Intel NUC, which is a few years old, I have to use an extension[1] which forces YouTube to serve h264. Otherwise it's a loud laggy mess.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#54

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

cat199 wrote: post #51
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in the US. In my EU country(Austria) second hand hardware prices are through the roof. There's no way you're getting anything half decent from the last decade for $75. And then there's the cooling and power consumption difference between a 10 year old system and a RPi. It's not even close.

> In my EU country second hand hardware prices are through the roof. Curious - any thoughts on why?

Small country, small market. Small market, low supply. Low supply, high prices.

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#55

Post by fpgaminer »

So I just got a fun project working with a Raspberry Pi 4. I have it generating a slideshow of fake images using the impressive BigGAN model, and displaying those on a 7" touch screen.

It's just for kicks; I wanted a little AI daydreaming on my desk :) Also to see if it was even possible, given how large the BigGAN model is. But lo and behold the 4GB Pi is _just_ enough to run it. I'm half tempted to buy this new 8GB version so I can run at higher resolutions ... but I think the precompiled Tensorflow package for RasPi is 32-bit anyway so might not matter.

Here she is: https://i.imgur.com/i22METZ.jpg

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#56

Post by techdragon »

cat199 wrote: post #49
intsunny wrote: post #41

I am strongly hoping that the 8GB Rpi + NexDock would be a good low cost laptop for web browsing, text editing and terminal. I've been turned off from investing in a new laptop for a variety of reasons: - Apple has made questionable hardware design decisions lately. If Louis Rossmann is to be believed, the T2 chip + secureboot situation is just as bad as the old keyboard situation. It sucks having no say over the har…

Interesting thought - how do you plan to power the Pi? seems this would more be a 'portable' than a 'laptop' Also - there is the 'pi top' kit if that suits your fancy.

I looked into this for the rpi4 a while ago and unfortunately the PiTop stuff won’t actually fit a rpi4 due to how it’s designed... at least that was what I was able to work out, I would love to be wrong.

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#57

Post by 2sk21 »

kart23 wrote: post #21

This is cool. Whats really holding it back at this point is it's use of a sd card. I find that its pretty difficult to use 4gb of ram on a pi practically, and its often bottlenecked by I/O. It might just be my SD card, but executing trivial commands sometimes takes forever and reminds me that I'm in a pi. I've heard ssds can improve speeds a lot, but you still cant boot off usb.

I also read recently that the lack of cooling can really throttle the performance of a Pi4. Do you have a good heat sink and fan installed?

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#58

Post by zozbot234 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #24
kart23 wrote: post #21

This is cool. Whats really holding it back at this point is it's use of a sd card. I find that its pretty difficult to use 4gb of ram on a pi practically, and its often bottlenecked by I/O. It might just be my SD card, but executing trivial commands sometimes takes forever and reminds me that I'm in a pi. I've heard ssds can improve speeds a lot, but you still cant boot off usb.

Could this be fixed by setting aside a few gb of RAM for a virtual RAM drive, and run the OS from there?

The OS uses free RAM as a cache for file reads anyway. Temporary directories that are not meant to persist after reboots are often mounted as a ramdisk however.

Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75

#59

Post by cmarinas »

rewoi wrote: post #34
NightMKoder wrote: post #22

For folks considering running 64-bit on the pi - I don’t think you need 64-bit userland. I’ve been running a 64-bit kernel on my pi with 32-bit userland perfectly fine. The few things that actually need 64-bit (I’m looking at you mongo) run in 64-bit mode via docker. That said, I’m not 100% sure how much memory overhead I have in this setup vs just running the 64-bit userland. Technically there’s a very interesting “…

x86 Linux had PAE mode, where OS could use large memory, but single process was limited to 32bit. There was some performance overhead.

NightMKoder's comment was referring to the x32 mode where an application uses the x86_64 ISA and registers but with a 32-bit ABI (ILP32 - int, long, pointers are 32-bit). The kernel is full 64-bit, so there is no overhead like in PAE where the kernel is 32-bit and needs to temporarily map physical addresses above 4GB (using highmem support). On the application side, x32 has some benefits over x86_32 since it has access to a larger register bank and wider registers if needed (e.g long long).

On ARM, there are patches implementing ILP32 with an A64 ISA (AArch64 mode and registers). While there probably is an improvement over the A32/T32 ISA, the benefit is not that great since the 32-bit ARM architecture already had 14 general purpose registers (AArch64 has 30).

The reason the arm64 ILP32 hasn't made it into mainline Linux is not fully justifying the software porting/maintenance cost over the benefit it brings. Full 64-bit software stack is in general a better option unless you run in a very constraint environment but, in that case, an M-class ARM CPU is probably a better option anyway.

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