I've been meaning to buy something from pine64. This might finally be it; especially with that e-ink screen.
I just joined the mailing list. Hopefully I can snag one of those.
Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
#52With 8 GB it becomes a viable small desktop box.
I tried the rk3328 on my 1080p monitor. Was fairly slow, and video playback was problematic.
Otherwise good enough for light usage.
Hopefully the Rockchip VPU patches are still making progress.
Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like rk3399 boards, unless you need deep suspend or video out through the USB type c port.
The only thing really atrocious on the RK3399 is the internal bus matrix. It's a legacy 32-bit crossconnect, i.e. physical address space is only 4GB. Among other things, this means the PCIe aperture is squeezed down to a very measly 2×16MB — which is not even remotely enough for a lot of PCIe cards. Also, if you install 4GB RAM, you only get to use something like 3.5G. Oh and if I remember correctly, PCI MSI are brok…
Where can I find more information related to these issues?
Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this board has a nice selection of features, its likely the pi4 is faster in any number of workloads due to the use of the A72s. A55's are still in the small/energy efficient category (the article notes they are slower than the existing rk3399). Which is fine if your doing traditional micro-controller functions. But the problem with these boards is they end up being application specific rather than general purp…
A quad-A55 is a surprisingly performant board - not a desktop replacement, but certainly more than a fancy microcontroller. Keep in mind this SoC is also clocked 20% faster than the RPi4. Not enough to make it faster overall, but enough to substantially close the gap.
There is a newer SoC revision on the newer rpi's. For example the rpi400 comes at 1.8Ghz base.
Even so, it seems the 1.5Ghz is more about running the system without a heatsink. Give one a heatsink and they run at over 2Ghz. The perf bump from 1.5 to 2.2Ghz is not insignificant.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-400-can-...
https://hothardware.com/reviews/hot-clocked-pi-raspberry-pi-...
Also: Arm itself says the A55 is ~18% faster than the a53. So, its still quite slow.
Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
#55With 8 GB it becomes a viable small desktop box.
With all of the connectors and interfaces, this is more of a dev board.
The article notes that CPU performance is similar to the Raspberry Pi 4, which is already available with 8GB of RAM and has better mainstream support.
Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
#56There's quite a few third party boards that are far better than the Raspberry Pi 4. I found the Rpi4 quite disappointing, especially the half-supported GPU and the lack of AES/crypto extensions in the ARM64 chip. Only ARM64 chip I've ever seen that lacks those.
If you like poorly documented/supported hardware, try taking a stroll outside of the Raspberry PI ecosystem.
I bought myself a rk3399 based compute module a while ago, the support was... sparse.
* The small amount of documentation that does exist is vague and incomplete. Many of the links were actually broken, so I had to fall back to using the docs for older models.
* The key expired on their apt repo and they never bothered to renew it.
* The selection of prebuilt Linux distributions is small and several generations behind.
* The community is small, so you can’t rely on things like stackoverflow as much as you might in PI land.
Overall, I had a good time with it, but getting started on a PI would have been so much easier.
Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing really atrocious on the RK3399 is the internal bus matrix. It's a legacy 32-bit crossconnect, i.e. physical address space is only 4GB. Among other things, this means the PCIe aperture is squeezed down to a very measly 2×16MB — which is not even remotely enough for a lot of PCIe cards. Also, if you install 4GB RAM, you only get to use something like 3.5G. Oh and if I remember correctly, PCI MSI are brok…
Where can I find more information related to these issues?
cat /proc/iomem on an installed Linux; note how everything is crammed into 32-bit addresses. Also,
http://opensource.rock-chips.com/images/e/ee/Rockchip_RK3399...
Page 13 ("1.1 Address Mapping") - same thing, everything crammed into 32bit.
PCIe Aperture is documented in TRM Part 2:
https://www.t-firefly.com/download/Firefly-RK3399/docs/TRM/R...
Page 711 - and I misremembered, it's 64MB total in 1×32MB + 32×1MB blocks. For comparison, my 6 year old server has 64GB PCI aperture space on each of its 2 sockets, my Laptop has 16GB. (Obviously both >32bit address spaces... which the RK3399 really should be too, but isn't.)
MSI is blacklisted in the Linux kernel somewhere if I remember correctly; it just randomly loses interrupts.
P.S.: Address space doesn't need to make a 32->64bit jump, my laptop CPU has 39bit, my server has 46bit; even 36bit (like old Intel 32bit PAE) would've been sufficient on the RK3399. But 32bit isn't.
P.P.S.: the PCI aperture size is the most obviously a problem when you try to plug in a GPU. E.g.:
0c:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Baffin [Radeon RX 550 640SP / RX 560/560X] [1002:67ff] (rev cf) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
...
Region 0: Memory at 900000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=4G]
Region 2: Memory at 880000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=2M]
Region 4: I/O ports at f000 [size=256]
Region 5: Memory at f7e00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
...
Capabilities: [200 v1] Physical Resizable BAR
BAR 0: current size: 4GB, supported: 256MB 512MB 1GB 2GB 4GB
The real problem is that PCI address space is not normally a scarce resource, and some RAID controllers & network cards (particularly high-performance/server ones) use a random bunch of it (>= 128MB) , and that's not even starting on SR-IOV. And these requirements aren't well documented because PCI memory space is not normally a problem. If you're lucky you can google " lspci", if not you only notice after you bought the card...
Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worry more about the price of a 10 inch e-ink panel.
Don't worry about the price - when the e-ink patent overlords learn that they are not being used for blessed purposes (digital signage or ebook readers) but as general purpose display sold to end users (gasp!) they'll probably become mysteriously unavailable. (Source: our company tried to buy e-ink displays to integrate into a product. All I can say is, it is difficult...)
What's the motivation for the vendors to vet use cases/limit sales?
Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
#59I've been meaning to buy something from pine64. This might finally be it; especially with that e-ink screen. I just joined the mailing list. Hopefully I can snag one of those.
One word: Pinecil
Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion, Raspberry Pi's main problem has to do with using SD cards, which are prone to errors and corruption. It's a kind of media storage that works best if it operates more statically--for instance, you read some photos on your camera, remove a few, take some new ones... and that's it for the day. They are not intended to undergo a large number of read/write cycles on a regular basis, and that's what the Rasp…
I read this same comment in every single HN post even tangentially related to the Pi. As others have pointed out, the Pi can run just fine off of USB and the newer ones support it out of the box. I ran my version 1 256MB Raspberry Pi for off an external USB drive. I only had to _boot_ from the SD card. There have also been, for a long time now, SD cards with much better durability than the cheapest ones you can buy o…
The problem is that getting a good sd card or flash drive is still a roll of the dice - you can't tell if a given device will suit by looking at its specs.
eMMCs are made pesirically for this purpose and its a shame there is bo pi model using them