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Comment by IloveHN84 | Hacker News Reader

This means, Raspberry Pi will be able to perform much better on kernel 5.2?

Nah, RaspbPi uses Broadcom Videocore as its GPU, not ARM Mali.

Modern Malis are amazing.

I am not sure if there are any benchmark websites but I feel that Broadcom's Videocore technology is way behind most of the high end smartphone GPU competition, such as Mali, Adreno, PowerVR, etc.

That's a given. Broadcom effectively abandoned Videocore. The only significant user of Videocore GPUs nowadays is the Raspberry Pi and this is a thorn in Broadcom's eye.

It's interesting then that the RPi4 has a VideoCore6 vs 4 with a ton more features. I'm not sure why Broadcom would put in the work if RPi was the only real consumer.

Because the VideoCore 6 is also already an ancient design. And last I checked Broadcom is still doing set top box stuff, which is where these chips are from:

https://www.broadcom.com/products/broadband/set-top-box

I guess they are just reducing their efforts as set top boxes are phased out in favor of smart TVs or Android TV and similar.

The Pi chips are probably surplus. This is how many SBC vendors are able to sell their boards so cheaply. It's a good repurposing as well, lots of these chips were going to sit in warehouses until the end of time.

The Pi chips are not surplus and never have been after the original Raspberry.

Yeah, every Raspberry Pi chip that came after the original was custom designed and created for the sole purpose of being used in Raspberry Pis. They just made some... interesting design decisions.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation was definitely optimizing for the IP their volunteers & employees were familiar with and had confidence in.

Other boards beat the Raspberry Pi in mainline kernel support, USB & Ethernet I/O & price years ago, but there is a significant ecosystem that the Foundation seeks to support, and the best way they know how to do so is with the tools they are intimately familiar with.

> Other boards beat the Raspberry Pi in mainline kernel support, USB & Ethernet I/O & price years ago

You sound knowledgeable, so I'll ask: if you don't care about the RPi ecosystem (or IoT use-cases at all, really), what's the optimum SBC across all those axes currently? Like, what board would you choose to base a cheap one-off HTPC+NAS on?

I like the OrangePi lineup, particularly the OrangePi PC Plus as it has 8GB eMMC and decent specs while being sub-$30 with a case and accessories: https://m.aliexpress.com/item/32668421022.html

For a NAS, nearly all of the OrangePis feature USB ports & ethernet that are directly wired to the SOC, so you aren't I/O limited like older Raspberry Pi's. That being said, the Allwinner H3 doesn't support 10 bit Hevc/H.265 acceleration, so you might want to go with a board based on a newer chip for a HTPC. Take a peek at LibreELEC, they have a decent HTPC distro for many SBCs.

Wasn't aware of that, thanks for the clarification.

Is there a mobile gpu benchmark site? That would be incredibly useful.

There is a good review here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14385/arm-announces-malig77-g...

It means that the pi is going to get some competition from other SBC that use a Mali GPU, in terms of graphics performance. From what i understand thought, this is an open source driver for Mali similar to the nouveau driver for nvidia cards

Currently all Raspberry Pis have a VideoCore chip, so this is not helping any of them. Except of course these v3d (= the new driver for Raspberry Pi GPUs) changes:

  v3d: 
  - v3d v4.2 support

However, Mali changes might help RPi5 whenever it is released in 2-3 years. There's a good chance RPi4 is the end of the line for VideoCore chips. Mali is a logical replacement for it, especially considering recent open source driver improvements.

RPi doesn't have a Mali GPU.

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