4 ms·

If your experience with "desktop UI on ARM" is based on the RPi and other ARM SBCs, the overwhelmingly likely explanation for this perceived lag is lacking I/O

by DCKing 6y ago

If your experience with "desktop UI on ARM" is based on the RPi and other ARM SBCs, the overwhelmingly likely explanation for this perceived lag is lacking I/O performance. Running a Raspberry Pi (or any system) from any cheap flash storage setup like SD cards or cheap eMMCs degrades desktop responsivity a lot. The ARM desktop hardware most of us have experience with has significant I/O problems, but that's due to them being cheap hardware, and not due to ARM. I/O is actually the real prevalent bottleneck for desktop interactivity on all modern hardware. Even older x86 systems with spinning platter hard drives are set up for a more responsive desktop experience due to the I/O performance being suited for the desktop. Modern Android phones and iPhones also have much better I/O setups for interactive use (UFS for high end Android, Apple actually uses NVME because responsiveness is so crucial) . Certainly CISC vs RISC has nothing to do with it as that discussion really has no bearing on the situation anymore on discussions about modern ARM and Intel (see my other post).

zozbot234 6y ago
> Running a Raspberry Pi (or any system) from any cheap flash storage setup like SD cards or cheap eMMCs degrades desktop responsivity a lot. Not really, if the system has enough free RAM to use as disk cache. For many scenarios, that suffices to run quite acceptably.
- DCKing 6y ago
  RAM as disk cache is only useful for things you have already loaded. It doesn't help your boot times, new program launches, or loading new content in your program. I'm not saying SBCs are "unusable" for desktop use cases, I'm saying I/O is the likely explanation for desktop responsiveness issues they encounter on SBCs.
  - dijit 6y ago
    Nobody here is talking about boot times, I was talking about responsiveness.. it's easy to test your theory, you can boot USB on the new RPI, and USB3.0 has quite a high bandwidth, definitely comparable to SATA2, nearly SATA3
    - DCKing 6y ago
      There's a good reason that they're making it more possible to boot a Raspberry Pi from USB. It's more reliable storage and has better performance for many use cases :)

by DCKing 6y ago

zozbot234 6y ago

> Running a Raspberry Pi (or any system) from any cheap flash storage setup like SD cards or cheap eMMCs degrades desktop responsivity a lot. Not really, if the system has enough free RAM to use as disk cache. For many scenarios, that suffices to run quite acceptably.

DCKing 6y ago
RAM as disk cache is only useful for things you have already loaded. It doesn't help your boot times, new program launches, or loading new content in your program. I'm not saying SBCs are "unusable" for desktop use cases, I'm saying I/O is the likely explanation for desktop responsiveness issues they encounter on SBCs.
- dijit 6y ago
  Nobody here is talking about boot times, I was talking about responsiveness.. it's easy to test your theory, you can boot USB on the new RPI, and USB3.0 has quite a high bandwidth, definitely comparable to SATA2, nearly SATA3
  - DCKing 6y ago
    There's a good reason that they're making it more possible to boot a Raspberry Pi from USB. It's more reliable storage and has better performance for many use cases :)