[HN Gopher] A Raspberry Pi 5 is better than two Pi 4S
___________________________________________________________________
A Raspberry Pi 5 is better than two Pi 4S
Author : MrBuddyCasino
Score : 216 points
Date : 2023-10-08 11:12 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hackaday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hackaday.com)
| mort96 wrote:
| The 'S' in the title should be lowercase, it's "two Pi 4s". The
| current title makes it sound like there's a model called
| "Raspberry Pi 4S" and the Pi 5 is better than two of those Pi 4S
| models.
| stavros wrote:
| Agreed, that's how I parsed it too.
| thiht wrote:
| Or maybe << two Raspberry Pis 4 >>? It feels weird to have the
| plural mark on the model number
| fanf2 wrote:
| "Raspberry Pies 4" is arguably correct, if you consider 4 to
| be a postnominal adjective.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpositive_adjective
|
| But it's weird enough that I would only use it when being
| jokey.
| guntherhermann wrote:
| In English, it would sound strange to say "Two Raspberry Pis
| 4", idiomatically we would probably always say "Two Raspberry
| Pi Fours"
| thiht wrote:
| Ok! thanks for the clarification
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| It is an artifact of the all-caps original title and should be
| lowercase.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yes also the only reason it is capitalized in the original
| headline is that the headline is presented in all caps. In the
| article itself they say "Pi 4s".
| undersuit wrote:
| The Pi5 better be better than the Pi4s.
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4s/
|
| The s stands for sarcasm. /s
| [deleted]
| kristopolous wrote:
| I look forward to snatching up cheap pi 4s when this comes out
| fanf2 wrote:
| They will still be selling new Raspberry Pies 4.
| https://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI4
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I would have thought it was Raspberries Pi instead of
| Raspberry Pies.
| ttyyzz wrote:
| I live in germany, they really want (EUR) 92.99 for one?
| That's ridiculous.
| fanf2 wrote:
| There are other places in Germany asking EUR87.49 and
| EUR86.90 which is not far from the nominal $75 price from
| Raspberry Pi, plus 19% VAT
| paulcole wrote:
| Who's going to go to the trouble to untangle the bread board
| wires and drag them out of whatever dusty drawer they were
| forgotten in to sell them?
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I think the implication is the scalpers who are sitting on Pi
| 4s they've been trying to sell on Amazon for $100 will
| quickly dump that inventory (and try and snap Pi 5s, no
| doubt).
| kristopolous wrote:
| I have pi4s I'm using that I'd love to swap out for something
| better. I'm sure many people feel the same
| stavros wrote:
| People who like money.
| 404mm wrote:
| It's nice they doubled the speed of SD controller but I still
| wish they just gave us some eMMC for the system.
| undersuit wrote:
| There's the RaspiKey, an eMMC module on a microSD card breakout
| board.
|
| Or the Compute Module which can be even more compact than the
| standard Pi format.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's also nice that they tripled the overall performance, but
| it would've been cool if there was a non-sketchy way to power
| the thing.
| 404mm wrote:
| I know it may sound silly but the need for active cooling is
| a deal breaker to me. I'm still hoping to see some massive
| heat sink or a metal case that acts as a heat sink. But the
| overall Pi evolution leads towards hotter, louder and more
| expensive, which there are better options where you get more
| flops per buck.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It's not a need, per-se. running a small service on it that
| only uses 10-20% CPU and just bursts now and then, I don't
| see it throttling. It's only running benchmarks or activity
| that uses one or two cores 100% all the time that runs into
| throttling (and even throttled, performance is a good deal
| better than Pi 4 unthrottled).
| [deleted]
| 0ct4via wrote:
| If you're going to mess with capitalization for the title, it
| would be better ending with "than two Pi 4s" for pluralization --
| there is no "Pi 4S" model.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| I have to think most Pi's in the wild are sitting idle most of
| the time. How many people are using them in compute-intensive
| projects? I certainly don't need more CPU to run a pihole or a
| rain gauge or whatever.
| wayfinder wrote:
| That's because for everyone who needs a beefier CPU, the
| Raspberry Pi 4 hasn't even been on the table.
| prepend wrote:
| I think it's great to have more cpu. My kids built a Minecraft
| server on a 4S and it doesn't perform that well.
|
| The small form factor is really convenient for turning on and
| off.
|
| Pis are designed for the edge case and that allows them to sit
| in drawers. If you design for the median only, then you'll
| never get to median because people won't be able to run and
| test the edge cases.
| bombcar wrote:
| For things like that the Rock boards are much much more
| powerful.
|
| Of course as you go up costs rise and eventually you might as
| well buy a Mac mini or similar.
| prepend wrote:
| Yes, there's obviously more powerful computers for running
| a Minecraft server.
|
| But pis are easy to build and manage and that's the
| platform my kid likes.
| _joel wrote:
| Maybe not the CPU per se but I'd imagine the extra beef GPU
| side could be good for digital signage and entertainment.
| humanistbot wrote:
| The pi4 is powerful enough to drive multiple 4k displays
| while doing face detection from a camera.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| I have been using RPIs for multimedia art projects where I am
| running heavy audio and/or video processing, sometimes maxing
| out all available cores. So I am pretty excited about the new
| specs :)
| humanistbot wrote:
| Mostly agreed, but "sitting idle most of the time" isn't quite
| the right metric. The question is if it can handle the peak
| loads. And a pi zero can run pihole and a rain gauge.
|
| I don't plan to upgrade my rpi4 running homeassistant, a Plex
| video streaming server, a tailscale VPN exit node, and a few
| other minor services.
|
| Plex on the rpi4 can't keep up transcoding 4k video to 1080p,
| maybe the rpi5 can, but I don't personally need that. Many Plex
| users do need 4k transcoding though.
|
| Also, I have tried to use the pi4 as a desktop replacement, and
| I just found it too slow for the modern bloated world of
| webapps. All the little things just added up to too much and I
| gave up. The pi5 might be good enough though, but with all the
| peripherals and pains of arm64, a used old laptop is still
| probably better on the price/performance ratio.
| mort96 wrote:
| Being idle most of the time doesn't mean you don't need
| compute, there's a lot of use cases (usually-low-traffic web
| servers, for example) where you're idle most of the time but
| when something actually happens, you want to handle it quickly.
|
| I use a Raspberry Pi 4 to host a Nextcloud instance. It's
| sitting idle most of the time, but the weak CPU of the Pi 4
| (combined with a fast connection and the fact that Nextcloud is
| a terrible pile of slow PHP) means that syncing lots of small
| files is actually CPU limited.
|
| (Seriously, I set it up on the Pi 4 thinking that Nextcloud
| would be mostly IO limited. I wasn't considering the fact that
| its file syncing is based on WebDAV, and every single WebDAV
| operation is a separate HTTP request which goes to a freshly
| spun up PHP interpreter which has to go through all the work of
| connecting to databases and handle authentication and what not
| in order to write a 100 byte file to disk. Still, it works well
| enough for the small size and quiet of the Pi 4 is worth the
| trade-off.)
| ep_jhu wrote:
| For my DCSkyCam project, htop shows 1.8 load average on my Pi
| 4B. It's always busy, with resources left to handle spikes
| based on what the camera detects (or post to mastodon/website).
| I'd say it's right-sized. Best part - not throttled, even
| without a case, fans, or even heatsinks. That probably wouldn't
| be the case with a Pi 5.
| johnklos wrote:
| I run BIND, Apache, sendmail, SearXNG, npf, and route a class C
| network over tinc on my 8 gig Raspberry Pi 4 with software
| mirrored disks. I just bought an Orange Pi 5 because it's much
| faster (it has four Cortex-A76 cores, just like the Raspberry
| Pi 5 and at the same clock, too, but it also has four
| Cortex-A55 cores, which are by themselves about the same
| performance as the Cortex-A72 in the Raspberry Pi 4).
|
| Moving to the Raspberry Pi 5 just isn't an option, because I'm
| already memory limited at 8 gigs, so 4 gigs would be unusable.
|
| I bought my Orange Pi 5 with 16 gigs, so I'm quite looking
| forward to doing the upgrade! Granted, there might not be too
| many other people putting this much work on Pis, but when
| you're power constrained, they're an excellent option.
| regularfry wrote:
| I've got a zero 2 sat next to me that's got uncomfortably warm
| because I've been pushing too much at it.
|
| What I've been trying to do is get it to chew through
| whisper.cpp at anything like a reasonable rate. It can _so
| nearly_ do it with the right sized model, the latency isn 't
| good enough yet, but the reason I'm doing this on a pi zero 2
| is because of the USB-OTG port. I can take the whisper.cpp
| output, and have the pi pretend to be a USB keyboard, typing
| what it hears into a second machine over USB. This gives you
| dictation capabilities in environments where upgrading the PC
| it's plugged into isn't an option.
|
| Like I say, it's not _quite_ there yet in terms of usability,
| but it 's close enough that I think the problem is just a
| matter of software (and arguably model) optimisation.
| fanf2 wrote:
| The Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 have USB OTG through their USB-C
| ports.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Those require a bit more power than a Pi Zero though.
| That's not necessarily a blocker but if the system OP is
| talking about only has USB2 ports a Pi 4/5 wouldn't be
| suitable.
| dingosity wrote:
| 8 second boot times? That's only 2 seconds slower than my
| Commodore 64. </snark>
|
| On the less snarky side... I'm sure it's a better system, but
| just because a core can run at 2.4GHz instead of 1.8Ghz, you have
| to take power dissipation into account. You have the same problem
| with overclocking: you can up the clock speed, but there's still
| only so much thermal energy you can remove from the packaging
| before you have to throttle the core to avoid melting the solder
| off the board or delaminating the PCB underneath the package. I'm
| sure the good people at Broadcom have taken this into account,
| I'm just commenting you can't just say "oh. it has a 33% faster
| clock, it's going to chunk 33% more data."
| fanf2 wrote:
| They shrunk the process size so the 5 is more power efficient
| than the 4
| GravityLab wrote:
| Any idea if the cooling solution mentioned, either as heatsink or
| fan or both, significantly impacts the footprint of the unit? In
| terms of weight and also dimensions. Can you reasonably cool the
| unit under load with a fan that is almost not noticeable when
| it's attached to the board?
|
| Really cool stuff in any case, glad to see this product
| continuing to get new features and spec bumps.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| They've shown off fan modules that fit underneath the usual 'pi
| hat' size, so it seems the answer is: no in terms of size.
| You'd still need cutouts for ventilation though.
| ddejohn wrote:
| Not sure about the 5, but I have a heatsink and fan on my 4 and
| while it was designed to fit inside the official pi case (there
| is no evidence of active cooling from the outside), it is
| _very_ noticeable in terms of sound.
| fanf2 wrote:
| I think the PWM fan control on the 5 should make it quieter
| most of the time.
| barsonme wrote:
| > But second, the new Broadcom SOC finally supports the ARM
| cryptography extensions
|
| Wonderful, this is long overdue.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I wish Raspberry Pi's came already constructed
|
| I just always deprioritized doing it
|
| I've built desktops in the past before, its more about
| disinterest in doing it at all for anything
|
| the services that will do it move the pricing of raspberry pi's
| to an equally as unattractive territory. might as well just get
| an old android phone and turn it into a server at that point.
| TMWNN wrote:
| I am all thumbs when it comes to hardware, and Raspberry Pi is
| about as easy to put together as imaginable. I purchased my Pis
| in "kits" provided by resellers, and assembling the kits takes
| about 15 seconds.
| Beached wrote:
| I'm confused. a rpi is comes already constructed? they are
| single board computers. all you have to do is plug in a power
| cord?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I usually have to add another sister board, or put a heatsink
| on or something discouraging
| nektro wrote:
| i wish they'd kept the $35 price point instead of competing on
| performance
| zachallaun wrote:
| I think someone demonstrated in the announcement thread that,
| adjusting for inflation, the Pi5 is going to be cheaper at
| release than the Pi4.
|
| Ultimately though, at least IMO, the Pi isn't about being
| cheap, it's about being capable while staying a great value. I
| bet there's a lot of hidden complexity in the pricing, and it's
| very possible that they'd have to compromise significantly more
| than 12.5% of the functionality/performance to get a 12.5%
| price reduction (to $35).
| jfk13 wrote:
| Yes, p5 [?] 306, while 2[?]p4 [?] 195.
|
| So pi^five clearly beats two pi^four. Three pi^4 would be close,
| though. If only we could just define pi as a nice simple
| integer...
| agilob wrote:
| How about p=5?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/physicsmemes/comments/dxlrw3/using_...
| lemper wrote:
| they tried. in Indiana. at the end of 19th century.
| [deleted]
| p1mrx wrote:
| > It also supports USB-C Power Delivery, so finding a power
| supply that's capable of supplying all that juice to the Pi 5 is
| a lot easier
|
| Isn't this mostly false? The Pi4 uses 15W at 5V3A. The standard
| says, to exceed 15W you should increase the voltage, but Pi5
| increased the amperage instead. 5V5A USB-PD supplies are almost
| unheard of.
|
| I wonder how much a 9V3A -> 5V5A buck converter dongle would
| cost.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| At least better than the Pi3-, which could end up drawing up to
| 15W on a connector that officially only supports up to 2.5W,
| therefore resulting in lots and lots of bricked SD cards...
| zarzavat wrote:
| Yeah, ultimately if you want to run a Pi you ought to be buying
| an approved power supply. Trying to use random USB chargers
| even with a Pi 4 is a road to unhappiness. It doesn't have a
| battery, after all.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Pi 4 does come with a power supply because of being even less
| standardized.
| comboy wrote:
| Yes. But also you can try putting some big cap between 5V and
| GND before it arrives.
| coder543 wrote:
| I don't agree. I found this straightforward statement:
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16712/usbc-power-delivery-hit...
| > USB-PD R3.1 supports three charging models: > - Fixed
| voltage > - Programmable power supply (PPS), and
| > - Adjustable voltage supply (AVS). > In the fixed
| voltage scheme, the Standard Power Range (SPR) mode supports 3A
| and 5A at 5V, 9V, 15V, and 20V.
|
| That's about as clear as it can be, assuming AnandTech is
| correct.
|
| Also keep in mind the existence of PPS as another data point. I
| have an Anker charger sitting in front of me that offers
| 3.3V-11V at 5A. 5V at 5A falls squarely in that range, as long
| as you have an e-marked cable that can support 5A. (I have no
| idea if the Pi 5 supports negotiating PPS, but it would
| increase compatibility with chargers if it does.)
|
| I agree the Pi 5 should have included a buck converter or
| something, but I don't think it's correct to say they're not
| standards compliant. It's just not a common use of the
| standard.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It's not hard to find at all.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver.
| ..
|
| 5v3A is the limit of USB PD SPR.
| coder543 wrote:
| No, Wikipedia is looking like it's out of date or wrong.
| It's _not_ a definitive source, especially for highly
| technical topics like this.
|
| Here is another industry source which has a table that also
| says 5V at 5A: https://www.graniteriverlabs.com/en-
| us/technical-blog/usb-po...
|
| In fact, using Wikipedia's sources, I found the actual
| specs and here is another piece of supporting evidence for
| these other articles:
|
| > The Fixed PDOs Maximum Current field Shall advertise at
| least 3A, but May advertise up to RoundUp (PDP/Voltage) to
| the nearest 10mA. Requires a 5A cable if over 3A is
| advertised.[0]
|
| This is a footnote attached to 5V3A, indicating to me that
| chargers are allowed to offer more than 3A at 5V.
|
| At a minimum, the spec seems to be ambiguously written, but
| I've only spent a few minutes skimming it. Multiple
| industry sources (previously linked) believe that 5V@5A is
| within the spec, even without using PPS.
|
| [0]: "USB_PD_R3_1 V1.8 2023-04"
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| You're both correct, but USB Power Delivery, like so many
| things USB, is a total mess with different revisions, and
| versions of those revisions, that each extend and
| deprecate parts of the previous revision. I'm going to
| ignore the actual protocol used for negotiation here, but
| there have also been at least three different protocols.
|
| The first revision, rev 1.0, had six fixed power
| profiles: 5V/2A, 12V/1.5A, 12V/3.0A, 12V/5.0A, 20V/3.0A
| and 20V/5.0A. These were deprecated by rev 2.0, version
| 1.2, which instead introduced power rules at four fixed
| voltages, supporting power supplies with different output
| powers. The maximum supported currents by the
| specification were 5V/3A, 9V/3A, 15V/3A and 20V/5A. These
| power rules were retroactively named the Standard Power
| Range (SPR) in rev 3.1. That revision also added the
| Extended Power Range (EPR), which raised all the current
| limits up to 5A, but only when used with electronically
| marked cables. EPR also added power rules at 28V, 36V and
| 48V, again requiring (differently) marked cables and up
| to 5A. So 5V/5A is a valid option, but only when used
| with a USB PD rev 3.1 compatible power supply and cable.
|
| Orthogonally to the fixed power rules, rev 3.0 introduced
| the Programmable Power Supply, which allows a
| configurable voltage between 3.3V and 21V in steps of 20
| mV. This was extended by rev 3.1 with voltages between
| 15V and 48V in steps of 100 mV, called the Adjustable
| Voltage Supply. As far as I'm aware this is not commonly
| used, and most products advertising Power Delivery
| support use the predefined power rules.
| reactordev wrote:
| The standard of evolving standard. Those looking take
| note, don't rush to standardize something when the tech
| itself is still being tweaked and iterated on. Let it
| iterate, document it, but don't put standards in place
| when you clearly can't track or regulate it. You just
| look like that boomer who just now got their Windows 10
| Upgrade CD to work.
|
| The reality is that with variable and programmable power
| supplies, it's now up to the device to draw power at a
| balanced rate from the supply, instead of the "supply"
| pushing power in. Modern tech has allowed us to have
| supplies between 3V-48V, 500ma to 10A. All with a usbc
| head.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| Hate to be that guy but tweaking and iterating power
| delivery systems with no standards sounds like a way to
| get houses burned down.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Not standardising gave us the myriad of charging and
| headphone plugs on mobile phones in the late 90s/early
| 2000s.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I hate USB-C. What a mess.
|
| What good is a universal port if it's not actually
| universal? I would actually prefer different shapes,
| because then you could be pretty confident that if
| everything fit it was going to work. Like how USB used to
| be.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I would actually prefer different shapes, because then
| you could be pretty confident that if everything fit it
| was going to work.
|
| The baseline profiles for power delivery (i.e. anything
| up to 20V@5A) have been all but done for two, three years
| now - you can readily buy combinations of PD and MUX
| chipsets that handle _everything_ you can throw at them,
| and Anker has high-quality chargers to supply the juice.
|
| The thing where USB-C still has issues is alternate
| modes. USBx usually works on all ports of a laptop or PC
| and virtually all cables, but anything involving TB,
| display, debug or audio is a hit-and-miss given how
| incredibly difficult it is to route all these high-
| frequency signals and properly mux them.
| simondotau wrote:
| > What a mess.
|
| It's such a mess that the EU took one look at it and said
| "let's make that a universal standard and force it upon
| everyone!" Modern USB truly is the government bureaucracy
| of standards.
| Guvante wrote:
| EU has been trying to work with Apple on this almost
| since the lighting cable was released.
|
| I believe there were discussions about potentially
| standardizing on Lighting if Apple relinquished it's
| tight control over the technology but they were not
| interested in that path.
|
| The EU decided that Apple cannot dictate what cables are
| used to charge their phones to the degree of at one point
| charging manufacturers $4 per cable (to be fair it seems
| like Apple was providing the hardware so it wasn't a pure
| licensing charge).
| Guvante wrote:
| Is it really worse now than it was before?
|
| Having a plug on say a laptop that can be a charger, a
| HID, a drive, a monitor, or all of the above with a
| docking station is vastly superior to the old day IMHO.
|
| Unfortunately the cable to do that isn't cheap and is
| massively overkill for say a phone charger. Thus cable
| compatibility becomes a thing but looking at HDMI cable
| compatibility is always a thing.
|
| I think the problem is what used to be complaints about
| niche connectors are complaints about USB-C and it feels
| different and more impactful even if it isn't
| necessarily.
|
| After all I know back in the Mini-USB days you had
| manufacturers skipping the data pins to save some copper
| leading to frustration when you couldn't transfer files.
| yftsui wrote:
| It is really worse. I have ton of USB-C cables doesn't
| transfer data from flash lights, a lot of USB 2.0 speed
| cables with USB-C connector, then USB 3.0 cables rated at
| 5G/10Gbps without an easy way to know the difference,
| then Thunderbolt 3 / 4 cables one each.
|
| Besides Thunderbolt cables, there is not a standard nor
| universal way to identity them. I had to test each cable
| by plug in an SSD then speed test the SSD.
|
| Flash back 15 years, a cable with MicroUSB either
| transfer data, or not. The difference between high speed
| / super speed only lives in the device.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Seems to be finally coalescing around something sane with
| USB4 ? (USB3 having been a "beta" version...)
| geerlingguy wrote:
| From my anecdotal evidence, I've found so far only the Radxa
| 30W adapter can negotiate 5v5a, most others only go up to 3A,
| and a few rare ones to 4a, but none I can find in the US.
|
| Even if the power adapter supplies it, without a high quality
| cable there's enough voltage drop to trigger the low voltage
| warning.
|
| I recommend the official supply or eventually the official new
| PoE+ HAT for now.
| regularfry wrote:
| Probably about the same as the official supply, you'll probably
| start seeing them pop up. The current price I can see for the
| 5V5A supply is PS11.90.
|
| They go into the trade-off in one of the launch videos.
| Apparently if you've only got a 3A supply then the downstream
| USB power gets limited but otherwise it works.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| [flagged]
| ss48 wrote:
| Regarding the Side Note: probably because of their
| acquisition by Seimens:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27556552
| tjoff wrote:
| It is part of USB C PD, using PPS.
|
| Which is kind of new.
| johann8384 wrote:
| And an Orange Pi 5Plus is even better
| Wenturon wrote:
| [dead]
| lagniappe wrote:
| As someone who thought they were getting away with something
| finding Pi4's in stock at a normal price... welllll shit.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Pi4 is still a great piece of kit, it's only 8W (the 5 is 12W),
| and you're not going to be as worried with cooling. There are a
| ton of projects out there for which the 4 is a good choice.
|
| For a general purpose computer though, the 5 is getting to the
| point where it is competitive for a lot of use cases where the
| 4 was a bit of a struggle. It sounds like I could definitely
| consider using a 5 as a mini-workstation for web browsing, some
| light dev work and the like, in those cases where the 4 felt a
| little clunky.
| ralphc wrote:
| Yeah, as soon as I heard about the 5 needing cooling for most
| tasks I went ahead and got a 8GB Pi 4. That will be powerful
| enough for what I'm going to use it for, I have plenty of
| "real" computers for beefier projects.
| coder543 wrote:
| > Yeah, as soon as I heard about the 5 needing cooling for
| most tasks I went ahead and got a 8GB Pi 4.
|
| You heard wrong, then.
|
| "For normal usage of your Raspberry Pi, adding cooling is
| entirely optional. The idle performance of a Raspberry Pi 4
| and a Raspberry Pi 5 is about the same, and under typical
| loads Raspberry Pi 5 will run cooler than a similarly
| loaded Raspberry Pi 4."
|
| "even when fully throttled, a Raspberry Pi 5 is still going
| to run faster than a Raspberry Pi 4!"
|
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/heating-and-cooling-
| raspber...
|
| A Pi 5 has a higher performance ceiling than the Pi 4 when
| passively cooled, and an even higher one with active
| cooling. The Pi 5 _does not_ need cooling for most tasks.
| sho_hn wrote:
| A Pi 5 shouldn't require cooling for anything that a Pi 4
| doesn't require cooling for.
|
| Pi 4s require cooling for many workloads (they run
| notoriously hot).
|
| You're more likely to run into the needs-cooling envelope
| of a Pi 4.
| rewmie wrote:
| > Yeah, as soon as I heard about the 5 needing cooling for
| most tasks (...)
|
| I'm sure those who put a premium on thermals or quietness
| will be able to run RPi5 with passive cooling if they
| really want to. The RPi4 already suffered from thermal
| issues and that didn't pose a major problem. Anyone could
| simply drop by Amazon and pick one of the many passive
| cooling cases without any issue.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I'm hoping Flirc updates their passive heatsink case for
| Pi 5. It's my favorite case for the Pi, and it should be
| able to handle the 5's slightly increased temps.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| I enjoy using the R.Pi 4 and R.Pi 400 and from the start I've
| been a supporter of this class of _relatively inexpensive_
| Linux-first device.
|
| But the R.Pi 4x series is _peak R.Pi_ for me. In the last
| couple of years, _NUC_ -class SFF devices with Intel-based
| chipsets have appeared [1] and they offer a much better
| performance profile (speed, power consumption) than the R.Pi
| 5. Some of these devices offer dual gigabit Ethernet.
|
| [1] Liliputing is one site that I follow for related
| information.
| eropple wrote:
| The Orange Pi 5 series offers similar in a relatively small
| board factor too, though, as well as stuff like HDMI video
| capture, built-in or modular eMMC, Rockchip's new(-ish)
| NPU, dual 2.5Gbps Ethernet, and M.2 support. It's a big
| reason why the RPi5 kind of falls flat for me: it's a worse
| one of those, and not really much cheaper.
|
| I have a few NUC-style very small form factor Intel
| machines around too, of course, but there are a lot of good
| options out there and ARM shouldn't be discounted.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I can't find an OPi 5 for less than $100, nearly double
| the price of the low spec Pi 5, and other good boards
| like the Rock 5 B start in the $130s.
|
| I would love to see an RK3588S board for < $50, because
| the chip is incredible in terms of efficiency and feature
| set... but it's just so expensive still.
| bscphil wrote:
| Do you have a good sense of what boards are worth looking
| at for media center use cases? In the last few years it's
| become the norm to need to be able to drive a 4k display
| with HDR metadata, and decode 4k HEVC _with_ HDR in
| hardware (and ideally pass through Dolby Vision as well).
| The dream is to be able to do that with a relatively
| inexpensive board with just the mainline kernel.
|
| I've had bad luck with the Pi 4 with respect to video
| decoding. 4k HEVC decoding is an advertised feature of
| the Pi 4, but it chokes on anything with moderate
| bitrates in my experience. I'd like my next board to
| support HDR and HEVC so reliably that I never have to
| think about it, and I'm not sure if that's going to be
| the Pi 5 or not.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| For most of my use cases (3d printer controller), I don't
| really need any of those. So easily 2x the price for
| something I won't use isn't worth it.
|
| Not that I don't have an Orange Pi 5 for other uses, but
| that's gathering dust in a drawer because I'm waiting for
| good GPU drivers. The Raspberry Pi 5 seems like it'll
| have Vulkan 1.2 out of the box. I'm still waiting for
| Panfrost's new PanCSF drivers for the RK3588 Malis.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Orange Pi is a great platform & I have one, but now the
| SBC price is hovering around $100 or more and so a the
| reused 1L business mini-pc makes even more sense, if it's
| computing you're after.
| eropple wrote:
| Price-competitive NUCs are generally very old Celerons
| (J4105 and similar), which are CPU-competitive with the
| RK3588S but generally a little slower. Those NUCs also
| generally have glacially slow GPUs and poor hardware
| acceleration for stuff like video. And a lot of the
| mainboards of that era can't go over 4GB of RAM, whereas
| you can get 16GB in an Orange Pi 5; I've got three of
| those in my home k8s cluster alongside some older amd64
| PCs.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| The new Intel Alder Lake N N100 up to i3-N300s are just
| starting to appear. Most are semi pricey but we are
| seeing some sub $150 offerings, new. The top end N300's
| are easily equivalent performance of an 35w i5-8600t.
| With some nice extra modern features/bells/whistles.
| https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-
| stick-p...
|
| The real challenge is though that for most people,
| there's a huge market of secondary/resold business mini-
| pcs. These systems offer exceptional value. They're
| bulkier & idle close to 10w often, but if you're not
| doing battery powered or mobile robotics it's almost
| always a great trade-off.
|
| My old Acer Chromebox units were even smaller and idled
| around 4w, and had two pretty beefy cores (alebit with
| low clock and small caches) and gobs of io. 6 USB3 ports,
| which it could easily saturate & barely break a sweat.
| Internal sata and mini-pcie wifi. Incredibly great value,
| and I was picking them up for under $100 years ago. Stuck
| 2*16gb ram in em. Amazing value.
|
| If you need gpio, there are really really cheap USB based
| addon peripherals that offer whatever you might want and
| more.
|
| It bothers me a lot how many people seem to support a
| market for junky piddling slow & limited celerons. The
| chips you cite have barely changed in almost a decade &
| were low end to start. I used a Chuwi 12.3 laptop with
| n3450 for a while & it was quite survivable sure. But
| there's so much more value going to resale markets or
| spending a little more & buying a Lenovo business 1L mini
| PC when it goes on sale. I wish Intel wasn't able to get
| away with selling such bad performance for so long.
|
| Thankfully the new Alder Lake N replacement is worlds
| better. It's a great chip, and we can buy units at
| reasonable prices. I wish AMD competed here too but they
| have remained far up market.
| cfn wrote:
| I got a couple of Lenovo i5s with 8Gb for 99 Euros each
| on Amazon a few months ago. They even came with a 500Gb
| SSD and Windows 8 installed (or was it Windows 7? I can't
| remember, they are running Ubuntu at the moment). They
| are much better than a Pi and cheaper given the sourcing
| dificulties.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I feel like the Zero 2 W is the new low-power option. Its 4
| cores should be enough for most things, the 512MB RAM limit
| is a bit unfortunate though.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Get a Radxa Zero, I've been using one with 4GB of RAM and
| 64GB EMMC: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/10/07/1830
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Looks promising, but it's also a pretty different machine
| - I like the Pi Zero because it's cheap and just capable
| enough (basically I want a full OS, but I would never
| consider using a Zero as a desktop). The Radxa-s look
| quite a bit more powerful, but they're also twice the
| price, and once you're spending that much, the possible
| gotchas with software support make it a lot less enticing
| to me.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Which is why I only pick boards that run Armbian.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Looks interesting. Page doesn't say if drivers are
| mainlined?
| dark-star wrote:
| Cool little device, but will it work with the RGB2HDMI,
| PiStorm or PiSCSI? I doubt it but if it were, that would
| be awesome
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| it does seem like there is an in between that might be
| nice. specifically something at the roughly 4 gigs RAM but
| 5 watts, lower clocks and worse graphics. I think that's
| just about the right specs for a machine to run Linux
| without a fan and provide a good entry level experience
| (i.e. can do some real work in a terminal and watch video
| in a browser)
| sho_hn wrote:
| > it's only 8W (the 5 is 12W)
|
| It's 12W under high load, but at equivalent load (in terms of
| output performance) to a 4B draws less power.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| At idle it draws .2W more, but at anything above that you
| get 2x the performance per watt, minimum.
| pja wrote:
| An uncooled Pi5 is faster than a Pi4 running the same code.
|
| A Pi4 is still a perfectly fine microcomputer.
| digitalsushi wrote:
| especially in a dusty woodshop
| pmontra wrote:
| And a Pi 3b with a TV hat and tvheadend is a little less than
| 4 W at almost zero load.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| A Pi 4 is still a Pi 4, and who knows how long it will take for
| it to gain software support for whatever you are intending to
| use it for.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Rasberry pi's are by far the best supported boards out there,
| what software support are you talking about that they don't
| have but will eventually?
| rcarmo wrote:
| What do you mean? I run a lot of things in ARM64 boards, and
| the Pi has an almost insane amount of software support
| compared to most alternatives (I'm running an unofficial port
| of Proxmox on my 8GB Pi 4...)
| Semaphor wrote:
| > I'm running an unofficial port of Proxmox on my 8GB Pi
| 4...)
|
| I'm doing the same with Proxmox Backup Server, Proxmox
| itself runs on a more powerful thin client ;)
| myself248 wrote:
| For pure-software projects, where you could just throw an
| x86 thin client at it for cheaper anyway, yeah the pi4-pi5
| upgrade path is quite straightforward.
|
| But for anything involving raw GPIO, you know, the reason
| you might want a true embedded board instead of a commodity
| PC, the pi5 has completely changed the architecture. The
| GPIO pins used to come straight off the BCM CPU with direct
| register access, now they're peripherals of the RP1
| southbridge IC which is connected over PCIe.
|
| Chief in my mind is the rpitx/pifm projects, which (ab)use
| the DMA pipeline to cram baseband-rate samples into the PWM
| registers and make a GPIO pin oscillate at radio
| frequencies. Connect a (bandpass filter, please! and a)
| piece of wire, and voila, the board becomes a radio
| transmitter.
|
| This simply won't work on the pi5 without a complete
| rewrite of the core. Someone will have to figure out if the
| RP1 even offers similar capability, figure out if PCIe
| packet jitter will screw it up or if there's some buffering
| possible in the RP1, and rearchitect the whole project
| around it.
|
| However, neither of those projects has seen much activity
| lately. In other words, it ain't likely to happen. Just
| keep using 3's and 4's for this.
|
| For some stuff, pifmrds for instance, stereo processing
| really chews through CPU, and precludes running a station-
| automation package on the same iron. It would be really
| nice to have a faster CPU wrapped around the same transmit
| capability, but that's not what the pi5 is. If someone
| builds a station-in-a-box around this, it'll have a pi5 for
| the front-end but a pi4 as the actual exciter.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| Any data on the FLOPS of the pi5 GPU yet?
| fanf2 wrote:
| The VideoCore VII has 12 QPUs at 900MHz according to
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/james-adams-and-eben-upton-...
|
| The VideoCore VI has 8 QPUs at 500MHz producing 32 Gflop/s
| according to https://github.com/Idein/py-videocore6
|
| So, VideoCore VII should produce about 86 Gflop/s
| varispeed wrote:
| Missing opportunity to release 16GB version or at very least give
| specs of the memory so someone could swap chips.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| What do you need 16GB for that doesn't need a beefier CPU to
| match?
|
| I've been running multiple 2GB Pi's and I can't think of any
| reason why I'd ever need more than 4GB. If I need that also
| want more IO (PCIe/NVME) and more CPU to make use of it.
| zamadatix wrote:
| AI models are a pain to getting running nearly as good on
| smaller amounts of RAM (if you can get them running at all)
| even though the compute itself plenty usable for many. If
| your use case is always going to be a home dns server or
| using a few GPIO pins then it doesn't really matter.
| euniceee3 wrote:
| Any ideas on what it would take to accomplish this? Like how
| would the extra memory be allocated without a firmware change?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| On the Pi 4, the BCM2711 supposedly supports 16 GiB (35-bit
| address space, with top half for peripherals and bottom half
| for SDRAM)[0 pg 5]. However, there seems to be some firmware
| limitation that limits you to 8 GiB of RAM, even if a 16 GiB
| chip is installed.[1] I would assume the BCM2712 would have
| the same address space (or bigger), and, as such, could
| support 16 GiB (or more) of RAM, but the firmware is written
| with the assumption that only 8 GiB of RAM will be installed.
|
| The Pi firmware comes as a binary blob, but has there been
| any effort to reverse engineer it?
|
| [0]: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/bcm2711/bcm2711-perip
| hera...
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtym0TAWNto
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's not a firmware problem, the memory controller only
| supports 17 bits for the rows.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| So the hardware supports a memory map where 16 GiB of
| SDRAM could be present, but also limits itself to only 8
| GiB in another area? Wow.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| There are already tons of higher-RAM SBC options - check out
| PandaBoard.
|
| They're awesome for prototyping, but there are so many places a
| Pi isn't the right fit or scale. They're common, not the only
| choice!
| rewmie wrote:
| > Missing opportunity to release 16GB version (...)
|
| This seems to defeat the whole purpose of a Raspberry Pi:
| cheap, almost disposable computer to tinker around with.
|
| A 8GB RPi4 board is already more expensive than some used
| desktop computers, and until recently some major hardware
| manufacturers (ahem apple) were still selling high-end laptops
| with less than 16GB of RAM.
|
| I understand asking for features such as PoE and SATA support,
| but 16GB of RAM feels like an attempt to make the RPi something
| that's not supposed to be.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Also, 16GB LPDDR4x modules are crazy expensive right now,
| from what I've heard.
| zamadatix wrote:
| They didn't have the 8GB Pi 4 for the first year of launch
| either. I think it was Jeff G who said they were planning on a
| 16 GB release down the road.
| fanf2 wrote:
| Yeah https://youtu.be/nBtOEmUqASQ around 3:00
|
| But in this interview https://youtu.be/vXYzJ1os4NA at 11:50
| Eben says that the chipset does not support 16 GB.
| desireco42 wrote:
| Pi 5 is really nice but it requires a heat sink... this makes it
| ... whole different game to me...
|
| I think as long as there are both 4 and 5, it is good, otherwise
| this is fantastic they are experimenting as they should, but
| there is value in being low-power and versatile in my view.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I've got a metal case for the pi 4 (which touches the cpu, like
| a heat sink) and I hope I can do the same for the pi 5 sooner
| or later.
| moffkalast wrote:
| The 4 needs a heatsink as well though, otherwise it throttles
| under load, it just doesn't need active cooling.
| justin66 wrote:
| > it requires a heat sink
|
| It does not. They've made a point of noting that it's faster
| that a Pi 4 even if you run it without a heat sink and let it
| throttle the cpu back when it hits the temperature limit.
| desireco42 wrote:
| To me that means it does need it, otherwise you have a thing
| that would run fine in one moment, then crawl to a stop...
| wdb wrote:
| Raspberry Pi has been getting pretty expensive. Maybe I remember
| wrong but I think the first ones were like $30? Now they want
| $80+ for it.
| djbusby wrote:
| My first one was $25 (10 years ago?). But I think, from a
| comment on HN, that in inflation adjusted dollars for
| performance they are still very good.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I feel like they probably should diversify their offer and make
| both cheaper and more expensive models. Many people here
| including myself probably would love to have an even more
| powerful and less cheap model (e.g. I consider Raspberry Pi
| being a common standard extensible compact computer it's key
| selling point, don't care much about the price but often find
| myself handicapped by its CPU and IO performance while we all
| know similar type SoCs can do much do much better as many
| smartphones do), at the same time for many users and use cases
| it indeed probably should stay cheaper than it is becoming.
| Perhaps selling premium beefy models could have helped
| sponsoring cheaper ones.
| __jonas wrote:
| > I feel like they probably should diversify their offer and
| make both cheaper and more expensive models.
|
| They are already kind of doing this by still producing and
| selling the old models, on the page for the 3b there is this
| obsolescence statement:
|
| > Raspberry Pi 3 Model B will remain in production until at
| least January 2028
|
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b/
|
| I can find the 3b for around 40EUR new, under 30EUR used,
| which for me is kind of ideal, I don't have a lot of interest
| in the more expensive models.
| godelski wrote:
| They do have the zero, but it hasn't been updated in awhile
| and I wish it was. There are still tons of projects with
| benefit from these cheap microboards, even smaller than the
| pi. The Pis have become pretty powerful but also more
| expensive. It would be nice to have, like you're suggesting,
| a trade-off and it have a clearly good platform to use
| zarzavat wrote:
| Depends what you need. You can still buy the old ones, and they
| are cheaper than at launch. But now have the option to buy a
| more capable one, for more money. If you're in the market for a
| v4 then they're getting cheaper.
| lvass wrote:
| Factor in a proper PSU, storage, case and cooling, amd64 boxes
| are cheaper than Pis now. Going to replace a pi 3 server with
| one of those, not having to deal with ARM is a huge plus.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| For most people with self-hosting tasks amd64 is back as the
| way to go.
|
| As you say, there are a ton of "minipcs" on the market that
| directly compete with the Raspberry Pi on cost and power
| usage. They're typically slightly larger but the expansion
| options (bring your own RAM/storage) plus real I/O (with real
| PCIe), disk, etc IMO significantly outweighs this. They're
| also typically more performant and while aarch64 platform
| support is increasing dramatically there are still the
| occasions where there's a project, docker container, etc that
| doesn't support it.
|
| Taking it a step further, there are a TON of
| decommissioned/recycled corporate/enterprise SFF desktops on
| the market. They don't compete in terms of size (13" x 15" or
| so) but they can actually get close in power usage. Many of
| them have multiple SATA ports, real NVMe, multiple real half-
| height PCIe slots, significantly better USB and PCIe
| bandwidth, etc.
|
| With my project Willow and Willow Inference Server[0] we're
| trying to drive this approach in the self-hosting community
| with an initial emphasis on Home Assistant. They're generally
| sick of Raspberry PI supply shortages, very limited
| performance, poor I/O, flaky SD cards, etc. The Raspberry Pi
| is still pretty popular for "my first Home Assistant" but
| generally once people get bitten by the self-hosting bug they
| end up looking more like homelab very quickly.
|
| For Willow particularly we emphasize use of GPUs because a
| voice assistant can't be waiting > 10 seconds to do speech
| recognition and speech synthesis. There are approaches out
| there trying to kind of get something working using Whisper
| tiny but in our ample internal testing and community feedback
| we feel that Whisper small is the bare minimum for voice
| assistant tasks, with many users going all out and using
| Whisper large-v2 at beam size 5. With GPU it's still so fast
| it doesn't really matter.
|
| The Raspberry Pi is especially poorly suited for this use
| case (and even amd64). We have some benchmarks here[1]. TLDR
| a ~seven year old Tesla P4 (single slot, slot power only,
| half-height, used for $70) does speech recognition 87x
| faster, with the multiple increasing for more complex models
| and longer speech segments. A 3.8 second voice command takes
| 586ms on the Tesla P4 and 51 seconds on the Raspberry Pi 4.
| Even with the Pi 5 being twice as fast that's still 25
| seconds, which is completely unusable. Not fair to compare
| GPU to Raspberry Pi but consider the economics and
| practicality...
|
| You can get an SFF desktop and Tesla P4 from eBay for $200
| shipped to your door. It will idle (with GPU and models
| loaded) at ~30 watts. The CPU, RAM, disk (NVMe), I/O, etc
| will walk all over a Raspberry Pi anything. Add the GPU and
| obviously it's not even close - you end up with a machine
| that can easily do 10x-100x what a Raspberry Pi can do for 2x
| the cost and power usage. You can even throw a 2.5gb Ethernet
| card in another slot for $20 and replace your router if you
| want to go really dense.
|
| Even factoring in power usage (10-15w vs 30, 2-3x) the cost
| difference comes down to nearly nothing and for many users
| this configuration is essentially future-proof to anything
| they may want to do for many years (my system with everything
| running maxes out around 50% of one core). Many also
| gradually grew their self-hosted situation over the years
| with people ending up with three or more Raspberry Pis for
| different tasks (PiHole, Home Assistant, Plex, etc). At this
| point the SFF configuration starts to pull far head in every
| way including power usage.
|
| Users were initially very skeptical to GPU use, likely from
| taking their experience in the desktop market and assuming
| things like "300 watt power usage with a huge > $500 card".
| Now they love having a GPU around for Willow and
| miscellaneous other CUDA tasks like
| encoding/decoding/transcoding with Plex/Jellyfin, accelerated
| Frigate, and all kinds of other applications. Willow
| Inference Server (depending on configuration) uses somewhere
| between 1-4GB of VRAM so with an 8GB VRAM card that leaves
| for plenty of additional tasks. We even have users who
| started with the Tesla P4 and then got the LLM bug and
| figured out how to get an RTX 3090 working with their setup
| which also of course leads to absurd performance with Willow
| - my local RTX 3090 goes from end of speech to command
| completion in HA to TTS feedback in ~250ms. It's "speak,
| blink, done" fast.
|
| [0] - https://heywillow.io/
|
| [1] - https://heywillow.io/components/willow-inference-
| server/#ben...
| squarefoot wrote:
| The lack of GPIOs problem in Mini PCs could be solved with
| a cheap external USB->GPIO adapter such as this one:
| https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/ The above
| board was intended neither for the Raspberries nor for Mini
| PCs, but the code is Open Source and shouldn't be too hard
| to adapt.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| In the Home Assistant community most GPIO and other
| duties have migrated to ESP devices and the excellent
| esphome[0]. I have at least 10 devices around my home and
| it's fantastic, I haven't wired up GPIO to a Pi or
| anything other than a $5 ESP8266/ESP32 for years.
|
| Another instance of using the right tool for the job.
|
| [0] - https://esphome.io/index.html
| squarefoot wrote:
| Yes, that would likely be an even better and cheaper
| solution if one doesn't need to drive GPIOs from a
| complex OS such as Linux which would require a fatter
| board than an ESP one.
| comboy wrote:
| Any recommendations for these amd64 boxes?
| briHass wrote:
| It's hard to go wrong with the Optiplex i5-6500 boxes that
| seem to have flooded the market recently. Amazon has them
| for $100 with 16GB RAM and a 256 SATA SSD. They have a NVME
| slot and PCIx16. They seem to be cheap, because that chip
| won't technically support Windows 11.
| wingworks wrote:
| ^ This. I moved away from my Pi years ago to an old 2nd hand
| Mac mini I got cheap online. Dealing with ARM has a huge pain
| for many things I did. Especially back then when docker and
| arm support was pretty limited.
|
| But there were other times where ARM were an issue too. I
| just don't want to (and sometimes can't) compile things.
| jrockway wrote:
| $35 in February 2012 dollars is $47 today.
| burtness wrote:
| what about purchasing power?
| TMWNN wrote:
| Adjusting for inflation is a representation of purchasing
| power.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Eeeh, better to adjust to the respective minimum wages
| (if your country had them at both times) or median wages
| (if not).
| smcl wrote:
| Are people really looking to RPi for performance though? Surely
| the appeal is that it's good enough, open enough and has a bunch
| of peripherals and stuff you can tinker with. Or maybe I'm out of
| touch (obligatory: no it's the kids... etc)
| ddingus wrote:
| Increasingly yes.
|
| I am in that group now. Basically, my hobby development has
| moved to Raspi machines. I use a 400 as my primary station and
| various 3 and 4 models to do projects with.
|
| One very nice thing is to package everything up with a Pi and
| have that project be self-contained. Dev tools, I/O whatever
| all nice and compact.
|
| Start another project? Just setup another Pi and go.
|
| Having a higher performance model means moving more of what I
| do onto a Pi. Things like VS Code run reasonably, but not
| great. On the 4, many things are close to great.
|
| The 5 appears capable enough to change that equation.
|
| Nice!
| smcl wrote:
| Fair play then. I genuinely thought it was just a little
| dev/experiment/prototype platform for people, as it was for
| me. If this is what you need then god speed!
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