I hope the next upgrade would be a bare minimum flash storage so we can get rid of microSD Cards to do the boot from it.
8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
201–210 of 231 posts
Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
#202This 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?
I have a fan shim on mine, and it keeps it well within limits. The shim is controlled by the on die temperature, so it runs slowly most of the time, but if you run the CPU/GPU hard for any length of time, the fan really cranks up. You have to add a driver to have the automatic control.
I had a passive aluminum block heat spreader on it, and that works if you have good thermal bonding, unless you are really working it for a long duration. The problem is, if you hammer it long enough to throttle, that same mass takes a long time to cool back down.
The fan shim on a naked card just seems to work.
Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
#203For 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 “…
The x32 ABI but for ARM, and maybe it will gain traction because of the oodles of Pis! Thank you for telling me.
Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I have a fan shim on mine, and it keeps it well within limits. The shim is controlled by the on die temperature, so it runs slowly most of the time, but if you run the CPU/GPU hard for any length of time, the fan really cranks up. You have to add a driver to have the automatic control. I had a passive aluminum block heat spreader on it, and that works if you have good thermal bonding, unless you are really working it…
I would like to see one of those wicked vapor cooled heat pipes on a spreader built for the Pi.
Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
#205> 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 h…
Is it true that the L2 cache can only cover the first 1GB of RAM?
Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you comparing $1000+ laptops to a raspberry pi and a dock? If the raspberry pi meets your needs, consider a much cheaper laptop
Yeah, it's weird to see the comment criticizing the impact of Intel's CPU patches and Ryzen 4000 systems and then talking about using a RPi4 as an alternative. I don't have experience with the RPi4, but in previous versions the CPU and IO performance was terrible compared to even a mid-range laptop, so I assume it still is. If you use the system for any kind of work (even if it's just web browsing), an RPi system is…
Any relatively cheap (like $300) laptop is going to kick any RPi to the curb. And that gets you the display, the keyboard, the touchpad, and storage, all in the base price.
And no screwing around.
Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did an article on the topic after the Pi firmware update made the situation a lot better. A bare Pi is okay without a fan, but if you want it in a case, the Flirc case is your best option (IMO): https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/best-way-keep-your-co...
For my use case, I need access to the GPIO pins. The blurb on the Flirc says that access is possible but I don't see any opening. Can you confirm that GPIO access I possible?
I use this case: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/aluminium-heatsink-case-f...
Doesn't look as flashy as the Flirc case, but cooling performance is supposed to be similar and you can access all the pins.
Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I have this heatsink on it, and I've never seen the cpu temps above 60C. It gets hot, but I think it does the job. https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/aluminium-heatsink-case-f...
I have the same case and share your opinion. It gets warm, but CPU temperature is well within limits. And somehow the idea of passive cooling is very attractive.
Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
#209Question from a non-technical person. I've been reading a lot about tiny websites on HN (e.g. https://bearblog.dev ). Can we use these Raspberry Pis to host them? Are they performant enough? Is setting things up newbie-friendly? Having your own little corner on the internet that no one can shut down sounds pretty cool.
They are completely performant enough to serve small static websites, if you have low traffic (it should be confortable with a few connections per second). I think another limiting factor to look at is your upload bandwith. If it's too low, then it will saturate and your conection will be very slow. Some ISP provide asymetric bandwith (much higher download than upload), so that's not the best case. If you have fiber,…
It should be comfortable with a lot more than a few connections per second. I've just benchmarked my Pi4 running Nginx on Raspbian from my laptop over wifi, running Apachebench and obtained 322 requests per second with a 34kB html file (the HN homepage).
Running ab on the Pi itself, the CPUs can deliver over 3k rps though of course the network subsystem is an important part of the story.
Re: 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can definitely get OK used laptops for $75, that's why I asked that particular clarifying question. I'm wondering if they have any specific models or deals in mind, ideally with a link to an online retailer.
Thinkpad X230 can be picked up for around $100. I use one as my daily driver, another $70 or so picks you up an SSD and a 16GB ram kit.
Think that'd make a better server than a Raspberry Pi 4 for the price? It's nice that it includes a built-in battery backup, plus screen/mouse/keyboard for initial setup and later debugging. On the down side, it takes up more space.