6 ms·

As someone who thought they were getting away with something finding Pi4's in stock at a normal price... welllll shit.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
A Pi 4 is still a Pi 4, and who knows how long it will take for it to gain software support for whatever you are intending to use it for.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  What do you mean? I run a lot of things in ARM64 boards, and the Pi has an almost insane amount of software support compared to most alternatives (I'm running an unofficial port of Proxmox on my 8GB Pi 4...)
  - myself248 3y ago
    For pure-software projects, where you could just throw an x86 thin client at it for cheaper anyway, yeah the pi4→pi5 upgrade path is quite straightforward. But for anything involving raw GPIO, you know, the reason you might want a true embedded board instead of a commodity PC, the pi5 has completely changed the architecture. The GPIO pins used to come straight off the BCM CPU with direct register access, now they're peripherals of the RP1 southbridge IC which is connected over PCIe. Chief in my mind is the rpitx/pifm projects, which (ab)use the DMA pipeline to cram baseband-rate samples into the PWM registers and make a GPIO pin oscillate at radio frequencies. Connect a (bandpass filter, please! and a) piece of wire, and voila, the board becomes a radio transmitter. This simply won't work on the pi5 without a complete rewrite of the core. Someone will have to figure out if the RP1 even offers similar capability, figure out if PCIe packet jitter will screw it up or if there's some buffering possible in the RP1, and rearchitect the whole project around it. However, neither of those projects has seen much activity lately. In other words, it ain't likely to happen. Just keep using 3's and 4's for this. For some stuff, pifmrds for instance, stereo processing really chews through CPU, and precludes running a station-automation package on the same iron. It would be really nice to have a faster CPU wrapped around the same transmit capability, but that's not what the pi5 is. If someone builds a station-in-a-box around this, it'll have a pi5 for the front-end but a pi4 as the actual exciter.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    > I'm running an unofficial port of Proxmox on my 8GB Pi 4...) I’m doing the same with Proxmox Backup Server, Proxmox itself runs on a more powerful thin client ;)
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  Rasberry pi's are by far the best supported boards out there, what software support are you talking about that they don't have but will eventually?
PaulRobinson 3y ago
Pi4 is still a great piece of kit, it's only 8W (the 5 is 12W), and you're not going to be as worried with cooling. There are a ton of projects out there for which the 4 is a good choice. For a general purpose computer though, the 5 is getting to the point where it is competitive for a lot of use cases where the 4 was a bit of a struggle. It sounds like I could definitely consider using a 5 as a mini-workstation for web browsing, some light dev work and the like, in those cases where the 4 felt a little clunky.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  I feel like the Zero 2 W is the new low-power option. Its 4 cores should be enough for most things, the 512MB RAM limit is a bit unfortunate though.
  - rcarmo 3y ago
    Get a Radxa Zero, I've been using one with 4GB of RAM and 64GB EMMC: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/10/07/1830 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/10/07/1830
    - dark-star 3y ago
      Cool little device, but will it work with the RGB2HDMI, PiStorm or PiSCSI? I doubt it but if it were, that would be awesome
    - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
      Looks interesting. Page doesn't say if drivers are mainlined?
    - blacksmith_tb 3y ago
      Looks promising, but it's also a pretty different machine - I like the Pi Zero because it's cheap and just capable enough (basically I want a full OS, but I would never consider using a Zero as a desktop). The Radxa-s look quite a bit more powerful, but they're also twice the price, and once you're spending that much, the possible gotchas with software support make it a lot less enticing to me.

A Pi 4 is still a Pi 4, and who knows how long it will take for it to gain software support for whatever you are intending to use it for.

rcarmo 3y ago
What do you mean? I run a lot of things in ARM64 boards, and the Pi has an almost insane amount of software support compared to most alternatives (I'm running an unofficial port of Proxmox on my 8GB Pi 4...)
- myself248 3y ago
  For pure-software projects, where you could just throw an x86 thin client at it for cheaper anyway, yeah the pi4→pi5 upgrade path is quite straightforward. But for anything involving raw GPIO, you know, the reason you might want a true embedded board instead of a commodity PC, the pi5 has completely changed the architecture. The GPIO pins used to come straight off the BCM CPU with direct register access, now they're peripherals of the RP1 southbridge IC which is connected over PCIe. Chief in my mind is the rpitx/pifm projects, which (ab)use the DMA pipeline to cram baseband-rate samples into the PWM registers and make a GPIO pin oscillate at radio frequencies. Connect a (bandpass filter, please! and a) piece of wire, and voila, the board becomes a radio transmitter. This simply won't work on the pi5 without a complete rewrite of the core. Someone will have to figure out if the RP1 even offers similar capability, figure out if PCIe packet jitter will screw it up or if there's some buffering possible in the RP1, and rearchitect the whole project around it. However, neither of those projects has seen much activity lately. In other words, it ain't likely to happen. Just keep using 3's and 4's for this. For some stuff, pifmrds for instance, stereo processing really chews through CPU, and precludes running a station-automation package on the same iron. It would be really nice to have a faster CPU wrapped around the same transmit capability, but that's not what the pi5 is. If someone builds a station-in-a-box around this, it'll have a pi5 for the front-end but a pi4 as the actual exciter.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  > I'm running an unofficial port of Proxmox on my 8GB Pi 4...) I’m doing the same with Proxmox Backup Server, Proxmox itself runs on a more powerful thin client ;)
CyberDildonics 3y ago
Rasberry pi's are by far the best supported boards out there, what software support are you talking about that they don't have but will eventually?

PaulRobinson 3y ago

Pi4 is still a great piece of kit, it's only 8W (the 5 is 12W), and you're not going to be as worried with cooling. There are a ton of projects out there for which the 4 is a good choice. For a general purpose computer though, the 5 is getting to the point where it is competitive for a lot of use cases where the 4 was a bit of a struggle. It sounds like I could definitely consider using a 5 as a mini-workstation for web browsing, some light dev work and the like, in those cases where the 4 felt a little clunky.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
I feel like the Zero 2 W is the new low-power option. Its 4 cores should be enough for most things, the 512MB RAM limit is a bit unfortunate though.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  Get a Radxa Zero, I've been using one with 4GB of RAM and 64GB EMMC: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/10/07/1830 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/10/07/1830
  - dark-star 3y ago
    Cool little device, but will it work with the RGB2HDMI, PiStorm or PiSCSI? I doubt it but if it were, that would be awesome
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    Looks interesting. Page doesn't say if drivers are mainlined?
  - blacksmith_tb 3y ago
    Looks promising, but it's also a pretty different machine - I like the Pi Zero because it's cheap and just capable enough (basically I want a full OS, but I would never consider using a Zero as a desktop). The Radxa-s look quite a bit more powerful, but they're also twice the price, and once you're spending that much, the possible gotchas with software support make it a lot less enticing to me.