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Comment by cyberjunkie | Hacker News Reader

Oh my! This is such a crazy upgrade. I've been using the RPI2 as my HTPC/NAS at my folks, and I'm so happy with it. I was itching to get the last one for myself.

USB 3.0! Gigabit Ethernet! WiFi 802.11ac, BT 5.0, 4GB RAM! 4K! $55 at most?!

What the!? How the??! I know I'm not maintaining decorum at Hacker News, but I am SO mighty, MIGHTY excited!

I'm setting up a VPN to hook this (when I get it) to my VPS and then do a LOT of fun stuff back and forth, remotely, and with the other RPI at my folks.

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> I've been using the RPI2 as my HTPC/NAS

Using the Pi as a file server can be a bit flaky. The ethernet controller was an USB one, and was neither really stable or took load very well. The new PHY on a dedicated link is probably the single biggest improvement with this new revision.

The HEVC is a bit unexpected considering the high license fees and general uncertainties. Let's hope the documentation can be released as well.

The HEVC codec may well be an additional cost for CODEC license as is the case with VC-1 and MPEG2(though that expired!).

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/conf...

So unsure at this stage, but that may well be the case for any license fees regarding HVEC. Heck, if they have absorbed those costs into the base price - I'd be utterly amazed.

are you speaking about the pi 4 or 2?

I just setup my RockPro64 with 4GB, also PCIex4, have an SSD, going to setup a raid at somepoint when I get it all figured out. The board was a bit more expensive than the pi4, but I am interested in playing around with it.

But it looks like its back ordered for awhile

I did not get that board stable at all I’m afraid. Lots of issues with USB drives.

https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/issues/112

ahh, I started with a USB 3, removed it though and dropped in the SSD. So far so good, and using Dietpi, it works great (so far)

https://dietpi.com/

> The ethernet controller was an USB one, and was neither really stable or took load very well

Hmm... that explains a problem I had with a pi of mine. Every time the 10/100 switch it was connected to rebooted, the pi would lose its ethernet link until rebooted. Never had this with other machines on the same switch.

Hmm, I've been using a Pi 3B as a router for ~6 months with no issues like that. I wonder if these were resolved at some point?

> Gigabit Ethernet!

Does it have PoE? Having to deal with one less cable would be nice.

Especially given that the latest spec, IEEE 802.3bt from September 2018, now allows for up to 100W per port:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet

There is an official PoE board that fits the pi 3+ which uses a 4 pin header by the ethernet jack to grab power. The pi 4 appears to have the same header.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/

I have one of these but am new to RPi. It covers all of the GPIO pins in addition to the four header pins for power. Is there any way to still use the GPIO pins with the PoE hat?

Yes, though you'll need pass-through header pins:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/introducing-power-over-ethe...

How is that Hat $20 when the entire board itself is only $35?

I'd guess primarily the lower volume of the PoE HAT would play a role here. But, it's also a fully isolated power supply with a fan. To me, it looks like this couldn't be made on a fully automated line, so there would need to be manual assembly, which is also more expensive.

I also balked at the PoE Hat and ended up going with a $10 PoE splitter (with USB out). Works with any Pi (until this RPi4 with USB-C).

Oooh I need to try this. Thanks for the idea!

Embedded economics. How many million hats are they going to sell?

Seems kludge-y.

IMHO, if one is going to do one of these types of embedded systems, then PoE should really be part of the design process from the beginning.

They're using the Ethernet on the BCM2711, and Broadcom has sadly deemed PoE not needed I guess.

The PoE HAT had a bunch of issues:

* https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/11/raspberry_pi_poe_ha...

> The PoE HAT had a bunch of issues

They released a new version quite a while ago.

I agree that it would be nice if PoE was built in, but there are better ways to say that than what you said.

Also, the HAT has a transformer (and I assume if they included it, they know what they are doing), which seems like it would be too much for every single Pi to include one.

It is a kludge. PoE is 48V DC, so any converter is gonna look bulky and impractical next to the Pi.

did they finally release the 100W spec? IEEE really let that spec languish for too long -- vendors got impatient and implemented their own. i had to write 60W PoE code supporting three different specs around 2015. bosch's design was the worst.

803.bt has been finalized AFAICT, but I'm not sure about product availability. Do a search on the spec # and you'll find results.

> now allows for up to 100W per port:

It doesn't draw anywhere near that. 15W max (for accessories), and 7W in heavy use (without anything other than the board itself).

My point was that PoE, especially with the recent revision, allows for very useful levels of power to be drawn, so if you're going to have an 'embedded' system with an Ethernet port, I would think it'd be useful to use it.

Why plug in two cables (USB-C (power) and Ethernet (comms)) when you can just plug in one?

I like the usb-c input.

The big shortcoming of the other Raspberry Pis I have is power. Plug anything into it and you risk undervoltage problems (even with the official supply)

  [   49.910905] Under-voltage detected! (0x00050000)
  [   76.949928] Voltage normalised (0x00000000)
  [  436.806032] rpi_firmware_get_throttled: 1 callbacks suppressed
  [  436.806038] Voltage normalised (0x00000000)
  [  438.886093] rpi_firmware_get_throttled: 2 callbacks suppressed
  [  438.886100] Under-voltage detected! (0x00050000)
  [  445.126338] Voltage normalised (0x00000000)

I hope the new power input will stablize things.

I'm wondering if you could power two USB 3.0 2.5" HDD through the Raspberry Pi 4 without requiring external power supplies for them now.

Would be nice to build a NAS with as few cables as possible.

An alternative would have been a powered USB hub.

I have one system where I relented and did that, but really, for many generations of pi... why is this even a thing?

For example, recently I plugged in a USB stick and a webcam and couldn't boot. So I would boot, then then plug in the webcam ... carefully. And there were still 2 usb ports free.

I agree with your excitement! I've been waiting for this upgrade forever. I keep looking at the other options out there, but while their hardware is great, their software is terrible.

Excited too, but $55 + $13.95 shipping = $68.95 is inching closer to the $99 (free shipping) territory of the Jetson Nano.

IMO, at this point you're not paying so much for the pi, but rather for the community and accessories. It's the entire environment that makes the pi useful; not just the hardware.

(I speak as someone who sucks at programming and doesn't spend a 1/100th of the time learning the latest as I used too as a teen. So having the community around to help with my latest project that I need something more than a microcontroller for, is immensely worthwhile. Obviously those who don't need these types of spillovers would probably be better served with other hardware.)

Absolutely this.

I mentioned it above, but just to reiterate- there are lots of great hardware boards out there and many beat the Pi (though the 4 makes up the different finally). However, they ALL have terrible software support: old OS's, bad drivers, out of date or incomplete documentation.

The Pi community makes it worth it to stay there.

To add to this, the bad software support had very real performance implications as well. I was surprised to see benchmarks where the Pi 3 dominated boards that very clearly beat it on paper

That said, does the pi have accelerated graphics yet? I was playing with pygame (based on SDL) and I think all the blits and other operations were in software.

When you add up adapters and cables the rpi is closing in on a chromebook on sale. So not that cheap any more.

Comparing one item at list with another on sale is a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Not really, what matters to me is the price I can get them at, including shipping, including taxes, including shenanigan fees, including sales, including discount codes, including 5% cashback on Amazon, including 1% cashback on other sites.

RPis pretty much never go on sale.

If you have a Microcenter near you, they often have 'in store only' sales. Right now a Zero W (limit 1) is $5 and a 3B+ is $25. Right now they list the 4GB 4B due in on the 28th for $55. (All $ in US.)

Sure, wasn't meant to be. Just saying that if you want to use the new capabilities, don't already have the accessories and buy the official ones it adds up. The older ones were cheaper, had less requirements and more common accessories.

It is in that the rasp pi's price doesn't have much slack. So it will never really go on sale whereas most other hardware with a few exceptions has a lot of slack. So it seems fair to compare the projected prices of things.

So, one party by default overcharging for their product and the other supplying it at cost makes you feel that when the one party puts their product on sale, a temporary condition at best the product suddenly become equivalent?

Then you should also compare the Chrombooks with second hand large format laptops, old servers on sale with new ones and so on.

Chromebooks 'on sale' are an entirely different class of product than raspberry pi's, they are larger, need wall power, have built in batteries and screens, are in general still more expensive and do not have GPIO.

I'm not singling out chromebooks. I'm just saying at $100 price point is crowded with a lot of old and new hardware. So a raspi may not be the best thing for you at that price point.

Does it really compete with the Jetson Nano? I thought it was designed for AI stuff

Sure, if you're doing CPU-only tasks, Jetson Nano is A57 and Pi4 is A72 which is maybe twice as fast, but if you can offload anything to the GPU at all (media encoding, neural networks, matrix operations) you'll probably get some enormous gains in efficiency with the Nano.

OTOH, your going to be pretty much stuck with whatever handouts nvidia gives you unless your willing to hack the firmware/etc and reverse engineer stuff.

Pretty much everything works on the existing rpi. Heck you can run Windows IoT on it. It has a UEFI firmware (edk2) port which mostly complete, and pretty much every distro and 3rd party OS supports it. And the hardware itself is mostly open at this point.

This. Jetson is part of NVIDIA's pipeline to drive customers to their chips. Raspberry Pi is vaguely that for Broadcom but is much more an end in and of itself. RPi is massively supported on the web.

If you're doing stuff that needs the Jetson, it's great, but the Pi is definitely better supported.

> Jetson Nano is A57 and Pi4 is A72 which is maybe twice as fast

A57 and A72 are very close in performance, as the A72 is an evolution of the A57. ARM's numbers have the A72 around 20-30% faster than the A57. The main advantage of the A72 was it fixed the horrific power problems the A57 had so in a phone usage you could actually use the CPU for longer than 10 seconds. But in raw performance it wasn't that much of a jump. A53 to A72 is around 2-3x as fast, though. A53 was the power efficient one. A57 was the performance one.

Both the Jetson Nano & Pi4 are clocked at around 1.5ghz, so the Pi4 should still eek out a bit of a CPU performance gap over the Nano. But if you're purely comparing factory vs. factory then the Nano would probably win over longer stretches as the Pi4's lack of heatsink results in it throttling down to around 1ghz after a few minutes. The Nano looks like it has a beefy enough heatsink to keep the A57's churning for a lot longer at their 1.43ghz spec.

How does the Jetson Nano GPU compare to the RPi 4's VideoCore VI?

The Nano's GPU is half of what is available in the Nintendo Switch. Based on some benchmarks I've seen, the one in the Pi 4 should be between 2 and 3 times slower.

Where do you get a jetson nano with free shipping?

Amazon

Also Arrow, NewEgg

I have a 10tb external hooked to my routers usb 2 port and have always been looking for something better. This looks like it.

TLDR; of cons from various sources:

- New SoC puts out more heat. Active cooling more important now.

- Video playback at 4K requires H.265

- Micro-HDMI cables now needed.

- Draws more power.

Other than that, looks like a major performance boost.

>Video playback at 4K requires H.265

Not really a con IMO, I haven't seen anything on a 4k bluray encoded in h.264, everything seems to be 265. The microHDMI is kind of a bummer though.

I actually wonder if the A72 CPUs onboard are fast enough to do software h.264 4k decode. They might be.

Do you have a blog or something for us, mortals, to learn

> I've been using the RPI2 as my HTPC/NAS at my folks

Could you provide some details? The USB-adapted ethernet & lack of wifi sounds limiting for a NAS.

Not OP but... If I would guess hes using OpenMediaVault? It works rather well on even gen 1 pi's.

It might work "well" as long as you don't need a lot of capacity, nor do you care about the fact that everything is running at < 30MB/sec.

The existing rpi lines are seriously IO bandwidth constrained in every manner. The USB3 on the 4 hopefully fixes some of this. Bottom line, unless you don't mind your photo's taking minutes to copy, your going to be much better off with pretty much anything else besides a rpi3 as a file server.

Feels like an exponential upgrade.

Do you have a good guide to setup a nice VPN server?

This script is really nice: https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

It sets up systemd and iptables and generates all certs and keys and wraps them up into tidy, per-client .ovpn files

Another to check out is http://www.pivpn.io. Very easy to setup and use.

Even so, A72 is a highly-inefficient chip (which is probably why they set such a low clock speed for it). Cortex-A73 would've been much better. But I guess there always has to be at least one obvious lacking in Raspberry Pi generations.

I'm intrigued as to why they didn't use a big.LITTLE design (or whatever they're calling it these days). Perhaps mainstream-linux still isn't so great at handling it.

Really the only benefit of that is energy efficiency if it is used correctly, in exchange for additional cost or lower max performance. Makes sense for a smartphone, less so for a mains powered device (and the Raspberry Pi SoCs originally were designed for set-top boxes, although I don't know if that's still true for the new ones or if they're custom)

energy efficiency also leads to higher sustained clock speeds if your not using a fan to move air over a heatsink

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