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If rpis had m2 built into the card it would be the premier ARM platform right now. Its so fast many people could use as their main desktop.
by u678u 6y ago
If rpis had m2 built into the card it would be the premier ARM platform right now. Its so fast many people could use as their main desktop.
- dokem 6y agoRaspi really needs to come out with a 'pro' model. I guess they kind of did with the compute module but raspi's are used a lot professionally in industry, probably more than they are used as a tool to get kids and developing nations into computer science.
- mdtusz 6y agoThe "pro" models exist - they're just not Pi's. Industrial IoT does use Pi's a fair bit, but this is IMO a misuse (I'm guilty of it too) and in the long term can be a disservice. The Pi is a great platform for a go-to-market product, but they have many shortcomings that for most use-cases in industry are showstoppers (most notably, Pi's will often fail without warning, or their "disk" will become corrupt). More expensive industrial products are out there and typically are more robust, and designed in a way that they can be more seamlessly integrated to a product - once the upfront costs are paid (both in development and dollars). What really needs to happen is other manufacturers making the development on their hardware more straightforwards. What the Pi foundation has done is shown that companies and developers want to just be able to run a widely available and minimal linux distribution and not have to muck about with proprietary and poorly documented SDK's behind closed doors.
- joezydeco 6y agoThe "pro" models exist - they're just not Pi's. Ssssh. That's blasphemy here. Any other ARM platform mentioned here gets downvoted and shouted down with "But it's not $40!". Let them play with their toys and leave them alone.
- dendrite9 6y agoI'm curious about this as someone who keeps eyeing the Pi's for a solution to a few problems customers have brought up. It looks like there is a pretty big cost jump to get something equivalent, but I may just not know where to look.
- joezydeco 6y agoThere are places outside HN where ARM-based product developers are happy to talk about this stuff and share their knowledge.
- deckard1 6y ago> Pi's will often fail without warning, or their "disk" will become corrupt You get what you pay for. But this is beating a tired horse that I'm skeptical was ever true to begin with. Are the people with SD card corruption just using crap cards to begin with? I've used a pi4 and rock64 and neither had any disk corruption. Plus you can boot on USB today. And fail without warning? Is that really a thing? No sensor saying there is a heat problem? You can definitely reach for an industrial product with similar specs. But just keep in mind that niche products may have even less market testing than a Pi. There is some truly crap hardware and software out there that people suffer with simply because it's the only player in the niche.
- sam_lowry_ 6y agorock64 has eMMC ;-)
- alyandon 6y agoIndeed - you do get what you pay for. I've personally had one 2nd gen rpi fail without warning and have also had several instances of SD card corruption. The SD card is probably crap like you say but it can be formatted and passed read/write verification testing when connected to a PC which is a bit weird.
- dokem 6y agoPIs are used in industry when possible because so easy because unofficial documentation and community is so large to the point where practically every use case has already been documented. It's much easier for Raspi foundation to release a more industrialized version than it is for another manufacturer to create this support and community. They could still operate on their non-profit mission with the profit. Industrial microcontroller and embedded companies do need to also make their software and docs better. There seems to be some modernization but it's slow.
- barkingcat 6y agoRaspi doesn't "need" to do this at all. The main goal of their foundation is to support education, not to satisfy a "pro" market. Just because people use them as tools doesn't mean they change the charter of their non-profit foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation I'd say the other way around: the "pro" people should go find another board to use, of which there are many.
- geerlingguy 6y agoJust noting that according to the Pi Foundation/Pi Trading, they do sell 44% of their boards to industrial customers[1], so education is definitely a primary goal, but they do have a much broader audience, and I'm sure that influences some of the decisions about what hardware and price points to target. [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/for-industry/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/for-industry/
- justin66 6y agoThat figure is amazing. I interviewed in person at a leading industrial automation company over five years ago. They were looking for someone to work on ARM stuff and I was (naively) proud of the work I'd done with the original Raspberry Pi in school. The hiring manager had never even heard of the Pi...
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoThings have changed a lot since then. One of the well-known names in industrial automation, Opto-22, now has adapters to connect their hardware to raspberry pi. And they're not the only one. http://developer.opto22.com/pi/ http://developer.opto22.com/pi/
- varispeed 6y agoI don't understand this divide. Why people shouldn't have access to "pro" level tools for education? I had plenty of instances in my life when I tried to do something with consumer tools only to be disappointed and giving up, but later on re-discovering the topic with better tools that lead me to some great results. Cost of low end nvme drives is getting closer to more expensive SD cards now (which are not meant to be used as a hard drive). I see no reason why RPi shouldn't release an update with nvme slot and even dropping SDCard slot altogether.
- intrasight 6y agoReally hoping that the RPi 5 has this. Combined with presumably improved overall performance, it would be a game changer. I don't think it makes sense to fork a 'pro model'. Probably cheaper overall to just add it the regular model.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoThat and preferably default UEFI; you can already use a third-party version on whatever your boot device is, but sticking in a tiny bit of on-board storage and flashing UEFI firmware at the factory would let us finally not need pi-specific images
- inetknght 6y ago> flashing UEFI firmware at the factory The factory can already flash the pi firmware. What does UEFI solve here?
- frabert 6y agoPresumably it provides a standardized boot process for other non-RPi specific ARM OSs
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoIt means that I can download a generic aarch64 OS image instead of needing the special pi image that knows how to work with its nonstandard boot sequence.
- bullen 6y agoThey are the premier ARM platform anyway, but the real problem is that a 5W CPU is too slow to work with, unless you write everything minimalistic from scratch!
- posterboy 6y agoMillions of smartphones running on ARM would disagree.
- gegtik 6y agoare you saying phones are running general purpose OS and apps?
- u678u 6y agoyes. Browser, youtube, video calls, docs, games, there isn't much they can't do.
- tasogare 6y agoThey can’t be used for local development, so hard to consider them a general computing platform. They are more akin to consoles than PC.
- posterboy 6y agoIf I wanted to programm I could get a shell on a server for example. Now touch screen keyboards are a different problem.
- entropicdrifter 6y agoThonny runs well on my Pinebook Pro, so in that case comparably wimpy ARM based Linux machines can be used for things like Python development even with an IDE. It just depends on how heavy-duty what you're trying to do is. Scripting in general runs fine on my ARM SBCs. The real trouble is if you've got something that you need to recompile every time you make a change and you don't have a cache set up.
- nimbius 6y agoit would still depend on the firmware. people forget that Raspberry Pi is controlled entirely by the proprietary ThreadX RTOS which acts as a hypervisor and allows Linux to run as a virtual "guest" on the pi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX and for the uninitiated, ThreadX RTOS is not the same as Intel's ME. ThreadX is a critical dependency to run any OS on PI. without Intel ME, you can still run an OS. this virtualization model is still largely why Pi performance is complete garbage compared to pine64, banana pi, beagle, and others.
- monocasa 6y agoI think you're mistaken about several pieces. First off ThreadX on the video core does not run as a hypervisor. It also does not impede perf on the ARM core. Additionally, yes, Intel ME is required to run anything on Intel cores. Without it the main cores don't start.
- nimbius 6y agoME isnt required at all... https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-now-you-too-can-disable-intel-me-backdoor-thanks-to-the-nsa.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-no... To explain this again, it technically is a guest. The GPU cores run a real time operating system called ThreadX. This operating system is closed source and rules the system without the open source Linux Kernel being aware of it. When the Raspberry Pi starts booting the CPU is completely disconnected (technically in reset state) and the GPU is the one that starts the system. You can have a look at the `/boot` folder and you will see some of the binary blobs used by the GPU to both start the CPU and run its own ThreadX OS (bootcode.bin and start.elf). You can learn more details about the boot process here. After the GPU has the CPU load the Linux Kernel, it doesn’t just stay there waiting to act as a graphics-processing-unit. The GPU is still in charge. IME is a different beast entirely.
- ylyn 6y agoIt's not running as a hypervisor. A hypervisor is specifically something that hosts VMs. The OS running on the ARM core is not running in a VM.
- mikece 6y agoI reading an article recently that if Microsoft really wanted to make Windows on ARM64 take off they should sell a "developer machine" like a Raspberry Pi 4 with Windows ARM64 preinstalled for $199. If such a machine had an M.2 drive as an option (microSD or eMMC default) I suspect it would be a huge hit.
- mike_d 6y agoThey don't sell them directly, but Microsoft maintains a list of boards you should buy (probably as close to "Windows Certified" as you'll get for small batch boards). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot-core/tutorials/quickstarter/prototypeboards https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot-core/tutorials/...
- wmf 6y agoDoes IoT Core run a full desktop?
- diarrhea 6y agoWait, a 4 times markup for having Windows installed? That doesn't compute.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoWell, Windows 10 IoT will run on a pi 3, but I don't recommend it. It works well enough, but it seems to have been abandoned by Microsoft, so it's doubtful there will be any updates.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoSeems like a great way to attract people to linux. “Hey I know windows so I can get a raspberry pi and try that.” Then “wow this doesn’t run very well. I guess I should try raspbian...”
- passthejoe 6y agoAgree. The main issue with using rpi as a desktop is the slow disk i/o. M2 on the board is what RPi 5 needs.