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Desktop performance my behind. What's the point of all that CPU power when IO performance remains in mid 2000s territory? It takes forever to boot, any time dis
by morio 7y ago
Desktop performance my behind. What's the point of all that CPU power when IO performance remains in mid 2000s territory? It takes forever to boot, any time disk access occurs everything crawls to a halt. M.2 has been around for 5+ years now and would have easily fit on this design in its short length form factor.
No datasheet for the SoC either. Again.
There are vastly better SBCs out there.
- reallydontask 7y ago> There are vastly better SBCs out there. Can you provide some examples please? Always keen to try out any alternatives
- rbanffy 7y agoI'd love to see other interesting $35 SBCs with reasonable performance.
- waterhouse 7y agoYou might check out the NanoPi Fire3, which I think came out in early 2018: https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=206 https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&... Has an eight-core 1.4GHz CPU, and is otherwise mostly comparable to the new Pi: 1G RAM, 1Gb ethernet. Has an SD card slot and no built-in storage.
- vardump 7y ago8 slow in-order A53 cores. I'd much rather take RPi4's four wide out-of-order A72 cores.
- rbanffy 7y agoIt really depends on your use. If you plan to build a desktop replacement, thread performance matters. If you want a small cluster node for educational purposes, more slow cores are better.
- vardump 7y agoClock for clock, A72 is 2-4x faster than A53. But yeah, perhaps it's better to have a lot of small cores for a cluster.
- megous 7y agoThat's great, but if you need crypto (because you have LUKS storage and send AES encrypted data over the network, like in a usual NAS case), A53 with aes instructions may be faster than this A72 without one. And so far it seems these cores don't have aes instructions.
- vardump 7y agoSeriously? They left out Cryptography Extensions from the RPi4 SoC? Any source / references? http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.100097_0002_04_en/way1395175472464.html http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.... Edit: Ouch if this turns out to be true... https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=243410 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=243410 Edit 2: Ah, also RPi3B and 3B+ didn't have those extensions. Oh well. Edit 3: Just tested my bog standard RPi3B+ running Raspbian. It could do "openssl speed -elapsed aes-256-cbc" 43 MB/s AES-256-CBC. Tried also with "-multi 4" and it resulted 144 MB/s using all 4 cores. So perhaps RPi4 will be fast enough with CPU only crypto... would still love to have HW assist. Edit 4: RPi4 running 32-bit OS can do about 65 MB/s per core aes-256-cbc. 85 MB/s per core for aes-128-cbc. So by using two CPU cores for encryption (+ heatsink + fan :-)) 1 Gbps ethernet can be saturated.
- megous 7y agoNice investigation!
- vardump 7y agoI believe it might be possible to use VideoCore VI for crypto acceleration. I think it would be pretty tricky to get LUKS to use it, though. At least writing a kernel module, but most likely LUKS patch would be required. You'd probably have to choose between 3D acceleration and full disk encryption. Looks like VideoCore VI is getting some compute shader support: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/anholt/mesa/tree/v3d-cs/src/gallium/drivers/v3d https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/anholt/mesa/tree/v3d-cs/src/g...
- rbanffy 7y agoIt's interesting, but it's an 8-way in-order part. Shipping from them used to be horrendously expensive, but I'm happy to notice that changed. Thank you.
- Matsta 7y agoYes, these are A53 cores which the RPi 3 used. The RPi 4 uses A72 cores, which are a lot faster. A53 are efficiency optimised cores and A72 are performance optimised cores. The RPi has such a big community that I imagine performance and optimisation will quickly surpass other chips, eg. Rockchip RK3399 [1] (2xA72 and 4xA53) and will probably end up on par with an Amlogic S922x [2](4xA73 and 2xA53). [1] http://rockchip.wikidot.com/rk3399 http://rockchip.wikidot.com/rk3399 [2] https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/02/01/amlogic-s922x-benchmarks/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/02/01/amlogic-s922x-benchm... To get the full performance out of the RPi, you are going to need a beefy heatsink or it will thermal throttle very quickly.
- seszett 7y ago> There are vastly better SBCs out there. Which ones would you recommend for this price?
- voltagex_ 7y agoVastly better hardware wise perhaps, but at least you'll be able to get a board until 2022. Plus, the Pi 4 will have something approaching mainline kernel support and a large community of people working on it.
- pizza234 7y agoI have a great interest in SBCs mainline compatibility, but I think they will always be "compatible but not fully", unless a given board will be specifically designed with this objective (at which point, there will be surely a trade off performance<>compatibility). The RPi3 has in fact mainline support, but is not "fully compatible" (at least, in the x86 sense). I guess this will be the case for the RPi 4 also. This is a shame, since any ARM board has essentially an expiry date. For this reason, my next board will be an x86 SBC (the "famous one"), however, it costs considerably more.
- jamesholden 7y agoAs someone who is not familiar with the other options, what would you recommend? I want NAS/Video Streaming capability.