14 ms·
It will be interesting to see what effect this has on future Raspberry Pis and other single board computers.
by Quillbert182 6y ago
It will be interesting to see what effect this has on future Raspberry Pis and other single board computers.
- john_alan 6y agoYep agree. Raspberry Pi needs to do two things to become really useful. 1) ship chips with native-AES/hardware crypto 2) get rid of SD and have onboard NAND, like a phone I’ve raised this on their forums but just get flamed for some reason by senior engineers suggesting that these ideas are ridiculous and it’s for education in Africa, I was even banned for suggesting they were shortsighted. Maybe education’s where it started, I don’t see why they are blind to the reality that most current users are tinkerers and Linux hobbyists.
- pjmlp 6y agoLinux hobbyists have plenty of boards to chose from, even before Pi existed like the Beagle Board.
- KindOne 6y ago>onboard NAND. I disagree. Having onboard NAND seems like a disadvantage, for like when it goes bad from all the usage. Should have one M.2 slot.
- api 6y agoThese aren't mutually exclusive. I would vote for onboard NAND and an M.2 slot, and perhaps also a jumper or something to select which to boot from. Normal thing might be to boot from on-board NAND but put real workloads on M.2 if present. I have to also vote for crypto extensions. The Pi 4 is the only ARM64 I have ever seen that lacks AES and CLMUL. Makes it pretty lame for web serving, router/firewall/VPN gateway, etc.
- john_alan 6y agoYep lack of crypto makes it dog slow for so many things. Including running a little Monero node or whatever. I would love to know why they chose to exclude this, it couldn’t make a big difference in price could it?
- rubyist5eva 6y ago> Yep lack of crypto makes it dog slow for so many things. Including running a little Monero node or whatever. Good. The last thing we need is profit mad crypto miners buying up every single Pi and we end up with shortages and insane prices just like with gaming GPUs.
- john_alan 6y agoRunning a node is about seeding the chain not mining, ofc. Also a free market means people can do with the stuff they buy as they wish. Whether I mine on it or stick it up my arse is just as valid as you gaming.
- rubyist5eva 6y agoDoesn't change the fact I'm glad they excluded features that make it unfavourable to crypto people - for any reason - so that I can buy a pi for what it's intended for at a decent price instead of wondering if people are buying them to shove them up their arse.
- sudosysgen 6y agoCrypto extensions will never make the rpi even remotely cost competitive with even very old GPUs. The main advantage will be general network ops.
- john_alan 6y agoI wouldn’t bother to educate someone so closed minded.
- CameronNemo 6y agoHave you seen the new firefly rk3568 offering? They have lots of I/O including an M.2 slot and SATA port.
- KindOne 6y agoNever heard of firefly. I've looked into it and I might get one with 8GB RAM. Thanks.
- CameronNemo 6y agoFair warning: the rk3568/rk3566 platform is very young. You may want to be sure that upstream uboot and Linux support the board before ordering. But the hardware looks promising.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoWhat's so important about hardware crypto? For me, the real game-changer would be some type of better GPGPU support on existing and future devices. Most of the FLOPs are in the GPU and it's not very practical to use it for compute due to lack of drivers and APIs.
- stefan_ 6y agoThere aren't a lot of flops at all in the RPi GPU, though. They probably want some sort of Neural Network inference engine, both because it is easy enough and makes for good educational content.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoIt turns out to be a difficult question to answer as to the number of FLOPs of the Pi 4 GPU, see here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=244519 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=244519 But it does appear the the GPU has perhaps 2x to 5x the FLOPs of the CPU, albeit with not much in the way of APIs to actually use it.
- hedora 6y agoHardware crypto has an incredibly low gate count, and essentially all network communication requires crypto. Without it, you waste the (much more power and die-space intensive) CPU on AES.
- zucker42 6y agoThere are plenty of SBCs with AES support.
- john_alan 6y agoyep but not with Raspbian and the community, or wifi, or ...
- tyingq 6y agoRpi does seem to have already split to serve two different use cases. The normal board for hobby/educational purposes, and the compute module for embedded "real" use. That works for #2. I suspect #1 depends a lot on what Broadcom can give them at a price point that preserves the Rpi history of being dirt cheap.
- PontifexMinimus 6y ago> 1) ship chips with native-AES/hardware crypto > 2) get rid of SD and have onboard NAND, like a phone Why are these important?
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoAt least for 1) hardware accelerated encryption/decryption makes many things faster. Even just browsing the web.
- numpad0 6y agoGot to have proper power section first. The left-bottom section. And designated external power headers rather than the USB or GPIO backfeeding(PoE pins might work for that already?). Some claims the chronic SD card longevity issue in all Pi is coming from dirty power Pi feeds.
- rvz 6y ago> 2) get rid of SD and have onboard NAND, like a phone Oh dear. That will involve the process of flashing OS onto the Pi and will increase the risk of bricking it. That is the reason for using SD cards instead of a NAND chip. Secondly, you can't upgrade the storage on it either and would have to choose a RPi with fixed storage space on it. Might as well get a M1 Mac Mini. I cannot imagine having to choose a future RPi 5 having either a 8GB, 16GB, 32GB NAND' and being unable to upgrade the space on it. So no thanks and no deal to (2).
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoJust because there's onboard storage doesn't mean they couldn't still give it an M.2 or something. And you can install an OS just fine by booting off USB, just as you'd do with any other computer.
- CameronNemo 6y agoOn lots of pine boards you can flip a switch or short some pins to prevent the bootrom from using the SPI flash or eMMC. The SPI is not removable, but flashing a bad payload to it is not an unrecoverable error.
- qwertox 6y agoI agree, I have enough bad experience with on-board NAND from other SBCs; it's no fun at all. The SD cards are nice for most use cases, but on some boards I'd really like to see a SATA port or M.2 slot which can be booted from and a x4 PCIe port (even if through an optional board or a HAT). I see the SD cards on the Raspis as modern floppy discs. They are good to have, but not ideal for some cases.
- willis936 6y agoI personally would not trade the hat real estate for an M.2 slot in most use cases. I use that hat slot for peripherals that enable unique and fun applications. Micro SD is horribly unreliable, but idk what the solution is without trading a significant amount of space.
- unixhero 6y ago
- wmf 6y agoThe RPi seems to intentionally lag around 5 years behind the Arm roadmap so maybe the RPi 7 will have Armv9 in 2027. I don't intend this as a criticism, just a fact. Newer cores cost more so RPi has to use older technology to meet its price target.
- monocasa 6y agoThere's a rumor on the grapevine that RPi doesn't pay the license fees for their cores. There's probably more to it than that (maybe they do for compute modules which are explicitly not for the .edu market?), but the word on street is that that baseline licensing cost is $0 for them from ARM. I ultimately think you're right, and we won't see a V9 in an RPi for a while, but it's a more complex situation than most SoC integrators that has a slight chance of working out in RPi's favor. Does ARM care enough to make a tiny core in their gate count niche? Does ARM want to give the free new cores to increase market share and get V9 features in the hands of tinkerers? etc.
- Teknoman117 6y agoWhy would RPi pay the license fee for ARM cores? Up until the Pi Pico, they didn't make their own SoCs. You don't have to be a licensee if you're only consuming processors. edit - the microcontroller was called Pico, not Nano
- monocasa 6y agoRPi is basically a subsidiary of Broadcom. And it was RPi engineers that worked on each of the SoCs past the original BCM2835.
- ohazi 6y agoThey're not actually a subsidiary, but historically they've been pretty close. Regardless, Broadcom is absolutely the entity responsible for negotiating with ARM and paying the license fee. If there's any truth to this rumor it's probably ARM discounting the license fee for the fraction of devices that Broadcom sells to the Raspberry Pi foundation. ARM knows that RPi is the go-to ARM SBC, and they benefit tremendously when developers treat it as a first-class platform.
- oblio 6y agoHonest question from an outsider: except for the hobbyist/techie points, is there a solid reason why you'd buy a Raspberry Pi? Aren't there any Intel Celeron or some such super cheap x86 small boards? I imagine you'll get a ton more oomph, probably much better software support and they shouldn't cost that much more.
- bananabreakfast 6y agoThere's a reason raspberry pi's are on arm. x86 does not do well in small form factor and would actually perform far worse is this situation.
- ahhname 6y agoThe x86 based SBC are usually a lot more expensive. Usually they start around $100 or so, but at that point they use way outdated chips. For instance, the basic LattePanda has an Atom x5-Z8350, which is limmited to 2GB of DDR3 RAM. The Pis really can do a lot too. Mine hosts a vpn, pihole, calibre-web, and a couple of other basic things. Really the only downside to the ARM based SBCs is they mostly use MicroSD cards, which probably are the greatest bottleneck in the system and mostly likely thing to fail.
- robert_foss 6y agoThere is no x86 equivalent at that price point & form factor.
- unixhero 6y agoNor energy usage.
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoThat's often said but seems to be a myth. - The Odroid H2+ x86 board claims about ~4W idle power: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus - This measurement of idle power on the Raspberry Pi 4 says it uses ~3.4W: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4 https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4
- yalogin 6y agoIf the OS doesn't want to use it, would it even impact the Pi?