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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Forewarning, comparing across utterly different segments of devices is bad & dangerous for the health of industries. And yet, let's dive in to just that: there's a lot more I/O than an RPi4 here! 8+4+1 PCIe 3.0 slots. Wow. If it can really use the bandwidth these slots expose that's very impressive. 4 USB ports but so few folks clarify whether that's for real or shared bandwidth under a single usb host or whether they're independent. So either an effective +1.25 or +5 extra PCIe3 slots of bandwidth there, again, if this device can saturate those links.

I'm wondering very much how the CPU fares. This is progress either way, but will it match a RPi4? The RPI4 has tiny I/O but I feel like it's probable the cpu performance is not radically unlike.

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Again RPi comparison isn't really what you'd do here. You have the freedom to put whatever GPU you want in there, it has NVME storage, etc.

It would be interesting to benchmark this against a lower clocked x86 system. But it's kind of an odd comparison as this has 5 cores instead of the 2 cores typical in a low-end PC.

It might become a comparison with the Pi4 compute module + the current breakout board they are offering which has a PCIE 1x slot. So far some NVME drives are confirmed to work. Keep an eye on Jeff's channel[0] as he's even poked around at getting a GPU working as well. But he's having some issues atm (personally I believe he needs a breakout board with more power output).

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc_Lh_a1BQI

Here's a fresh submission to HN on hooking up a 4-port gigabit ethernet card[1] to the Pi Compute Module 4.

Throughput is coming. I look forward to 2026 or so when I expect things like PCIe over Thunderbolt to start becoming more semi-standard, integrated on to more and more SoC. Already, a TB4 port can do 80Gbps of DisplayPort connectivity. With that kind of oomph, it makes sense to also start considering how we might also use those same transcievers & cables to do more data-oriented tasks.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945361

The CPU only has 8 lanes of PCIe. It's using a PCIe switch to get the rest of the lanes. USB is also connected via the PCIe switch. The ethernet adapter is connected directly to the CPU though.

I think Yunsup mentioned a small % performance improvement over the SiFive Unleashed. [EDIT I wrongly said the memory had doubled here - see correction in follow up comment] On the other hand the SiFive Unleashed was perfectly usable for general development use, even for use as a desktop.

I thought the Unleashed had 8GB as well.

Logs in ...

  $ free -m
                total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
  Mem:           7945         263        7151           0         531        7593
  Swap:             0           0           0

You are right!

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