Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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 However, they ALL have terrible software support: old OS's, bad drivers, out of date or incomplete documentation.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Where do you get a jetson nano with free shipping?

Amazon

Also Arrow, NewEgg

Reply on news.ycombinator.com