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The Raspberry Pi 4 is really impressive hardware for the price. In these CPU benchmarks with heatsink attached, it slightly edges out the Jetson Nano developer

by DCKing 7y ago

The Raspberry Pi 4 is really impressive hardware for the price. In these CPU benchmarks with heatsink attached, it slightly edges out the Jetson Nano developer board, which retails for $99. Since one of the popular uses of the Raspberry Pi is to be an emulation box, this will mean it will now be capable of running most of the N64, Dreamcast and PSP library comfortably. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ could barely handle even select easier-to-emulate titles of these systems. It might even start running a handful of GameCube and Wii titles now using Dolphin. It also helps it to run tricks to vastly reduce input lag that troubles most emulation setups [1]. And the nice thing is that all of that should even work on the cheapest 1GB model. It's even conceivable this can be used as a desktop in many ways. It is faster than some Chromebooks. However this will probably only truly enjoyable to use when using PXE for its main OS drive to have I/O performed on a server that can leverage SSD storage. Mind you that the software is in a very pre release state, so none of this is really doable at the moment of writing. Especially the VideoCore (GPU and hardware video codec) driver seems to be in quite a sorry state and there's not even a hint of Vulkan support. The beauty of having a Raspberry Pi over another single board computer is that software support will come eventually though. [1]: https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-runahead-and-raspberry-pi-4-the-results-are-in/ https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-runahead-and-ra...

megous 7y ago
> The beauty of having a Raspberry Pi over another single board computer is that software support will come eventually though. That's not unique to RPi. It's true for all kinds of SoCs from amlogic, through rockchip to allwinner, and probably others.
- Havoc 7y ago
  The support is pretty unique in my experience. Purchased a different board (tinkerboard) and was susprised how much less info there is on the Internet, how outdated it is etc. Def made me reconsider buying anothrr non rasp board even if stronger
tombert 7y ago
In fairness to the Jetson Nano, aren't you mostly paying for the CUDA graphics card? The CPUs in there are good, but I'll bet the Nano beats it in the GPU department (at least once the firmwares and drivers are super-optimized). Though that may admittedly be cognitive dissonance, since I've been trying to talk myself into purchasing a Jetson for more than a month now.
- DCKing 7y ago
  Most likely yes. There is very little known about the VideoCore VI's capabilities, but it doesn't look impressive. They state OpenGL ES 3.0 support, which to me implies that it doesn't even support compute shaders (introduced in OGL ES 3.1). It looks like the hardware lacks features many modern graphics architectures can be expected to have. As a point of comparison, Nvidia has supported compute shaders in their architectures for eight full yearrs now. If I understand the spec sheet correctly Vulkan will never come to the RPi 4 because of hardware limitations. On top of that, in basic initial benchmarks using OpenArena the GPU only shows a 50% improvement over the RPi 3B+, which is still using the same GPU architecture the RPi launched with in 2013. That benchmark doesn't test shader performance so it's not the best indicator, but it doesn't make the chip look any more impressive either. I think Broadcom is not spending the R&D resources required to keep their graphics architecture up to date. It's a shame because the GPU of the original Raspberry Pi was really good for its time, and maybe the most impressive specification it had. If you want to do graphics/compute tasks on an SBC the Nano (or just the full uncompromised Nvidia Shield TV) will undoubtedly be superior.
  - DCKing 7y ago
    I have spoken too soon. Khronos lists the VideoCore VI as Vulkan compatible - latest Vulkan 1.1 compatible even [1]. Apparently compute shader support is being worked on for the VideoCore driver [2], which explains why it's missing from current reviews. Functionality to support compute shaders is not even present in current Mesa's git HEAD, let alone on Debian Buster's older Mesa version. So it not having a modern featureset is a result of more driver issues. It's clear that this hardware has been a surprise release. Oh well, even then using an Nvidia Jetson gives you way better software support for graphics / compute tasks in the forseeable future. [1]: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products#submission_344 https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod... [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=V3D-Compute-Shader-Compilation https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=V3D-Comp...

by DCKing 7y ago

megous 7y ago

> The beauty of having a Raspberry Pi over another single board computer is that software support will come eventually though. That's not unique to RPi. It's true for all kinds of SoCs from amlogic, through rockchip to allwinner, and probably others.

Havoc 7y ago
The support is pretty unique in my experience. Purchased a different board (tinkerboard) and was susprised how much less info there is on the Internet, how outdated it is etc. Def made me reconsider buying anothrr non rasp board even if stronger

tombert 7y ago

In fairness to the Jetson Nano, aren't you mostly paying for the CUDA graphics card? The CPUs in there are good, but I'll bet the Nano beats it in the GPU department (at least once the firmwares and drivers are super-optimized). Though that may admittedly be cognitive dissonance, since I've been trying to talk myself into purchasing a Jetson for more than a month now.

DCKing 7y ago
Most likely yes. There is very little known about the VideoCore VI's capabilities, but it doesn't look impressive. They state OpenGL ES 3.0 support, which to me implies that it doesn't even support compute shaders (introduced in OGL ES 3.1). It looks like the hardware lacks features many modern graphics architectures can be expected to have. As a point of comparison, Nvidia has supported compute shaders in their architectures for eight full yearrs now. If I understand the spec sheet correctly Vulkan will never come to the RPi 4 because of hardware limitations. On top of that, in basic initial benchmarks using OpenArena the GPU only shows a 50% improvement over the RPi 3B+, which is still using the same GPU architecture the RPi launched with in 2013. That benchmark doesn't test shader performance so it's not the best indicator, but it doesn't make the chip look any more impressive either. I think Broadcom is not spending the R&D resources required to keep their graphics architecture up to date. It's a shame because the GPU of the original Raspberry Pi was really good for its time, and maybe the most impressive specification it had. If you want to do graphics/compute tasks on an SBC the Nano (or just the full uncompromised Nvidia Shield TV) will undoubtedly be superior.
- DCKing 7y ago
  I have spoken too soon. Khronos lists the VideoCore VI as Vulkan compatible - latest Vulkan 1.1 compatible even [1]. Apparently compute shader support is being worked on for the VideoCore driver [2], which explains why it's missing from current reviews. Functionality to support compute shaders is not even present in current Mesa's git HEAD, let alone on Debian Buster's older Mesa version. So it not having a modern featureset is a result of more driver issues. It's clear that this hardware has been a surprise release. Oh well, even then using an Nvidia Jetson gives you way better software support for graphics / compute tasks in the forseeable future. [1]: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products#submission_344 https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod... [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=V3D-Compute-Shader-Compilation https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=V3D-Comp...