It will be interesting to see what effect this has on future Raspberry Pis and other single board computers.
I don't intend this as a criticism, just a fact. Newer cores cost more so RPi has to use older technology to meet its price target.
I ultimately think you're right, and we won't see a V9 in an RPi for a while, but it's a more complex situation than most SoC integrators that has a slight chance of working out in RPi's favor. Does ARM care enough to make a tiny core in their gate count niche? Does ARM want to give the free new cores to increase market share and get V9 features in the hands of tinkerers? etc.
edit - the microcontroller was called Pico, not Nano
If there's any truth to this rumor it's probably ARM discounting the license fee for the fraction of devices that Broadcom sells to the Raspberry Pi foundation.
ARM knows that RPi is the go-to ARM SBC, and they benefit tremendously when developers treat it as a first-class platform.
At that point, yes Broadcom is ultimately paying the fees to ARM, but separating RPi from that negotiation is an oversimplification. RPi absolutely has a seat at that table.
And ARM probably doesn't care that much about it being the go to SBC (some cheap chinese board would take on that mantle without RPi leading the charge), but instead that it's the practical successor to what ARM was founded to do. Put passable performance, hackable computers designed by Brits in front of British school children as cheaply as possible.
Apple pays ARM for an architectural license, just like any other company.
ARM was created as a joint venture between Apple, Acorn and VLSI.
The chance they'll have stuff using RISC-V in 2027 is definitely above zero. It's easy to forget that the Raspberry Pi Foundation have been RISC-V Foundation members for years.
The sad reality is that the faster ARM cores don’t trickle their way into mainstream ARM SoCs very quickly. The fastest ARM chips go into cellular phones, set top boxes, and other mass produced electronic goods from vendors who can afford to implement them.
I hope this changes in the coming years as more chipmakers embrace mainline Linux and open source drivers instead of relying on the old models.
Aren't there any Intel Celeron or some such super cheap x86 small boards? I imagine you'll get a ton more oomph, probably much better software support and they shouldn't cost that much more.
in the past as a relatively cheap x86 CPU. ($9.62 per unit)
However, it's a 400MHz 486 with some backports (1st generation Pentium, no MMX even) and broken LOCK prefix so that software specifically needed to be recompiled for it.
And at 2.2 W too, it never ended up succeeding anywhere, with no successor.
The right era pentium had the same LOCK prefix issue (we used to call it the F00F bug)
Edit: Thanks for link; I must have anchored on the instruction set and ignored that it was using the 486 pipeline.
"The new x86 CPU uses an old-school 486 scalar pipeline and the original Pentium instruction set with some modern enhancements"
- The Odroid H2+ x86 board claims about ~4W idle power: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus
- This measurement of idle power on the Raspberry Pi 4 says it uses ~3.4W: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4
I have a _very old_ PN40 from Asus -- this is a full PC with an intel Celeron, a SATA SSD and about 8GB of RAM that idles at 1.7W (serving websites via GB Ethernet) as measured _at the wall_. This is just standard PC Linux distro with zero customization (other than `powertop --auto-tune`).
For comparison, the latest RPI4B without the SSD and with 1/8 RAM idles at 3.5ishW on the wall. Even the older RPI3 I could never get below 2W, and that is without any peripherals (no display, no Wifi, no eth, min USB) and significant tuning.
On the other hand the PN40 + components cost significantly more (probably close to 10x), and the CPU performance itself is not that good these days.
https://raspi.tv/2019/how-much-power-does-the-pi4b-use-power...
Raspberry Pi 3 was a Cortex-A53 back ported to 40nm outright.
Raspberry Pi 4 is on 28nm. (for comparison, Apple A8 and Snapdragon 810 were on 20nm already, in 2014-15)
It runs with a Cortex-A72 at a low clock (1.5GHz, phones even are at twice that clock nowadays) and quite high power consumption because of the process node.
The memory interface is narrow (32-bit bus, phones ship with a 64-bit bus and laptops/desktops with a 128b one) at a low data rate (LPDDR4-3200).
In addition to that, the CPU can only use 5GB/sec of it, with the remainder being reserved for the GPU only.
Those were some of the sacrifices needed to reach this price point. (and why it isn't representative at all of the performance of higher-end ARMs)
At the same time Intel was heavily subsidizing their x86 mobile SoCs to tablet manufacturers and for a while it was actually quite competitive price wise but it ultimately went bothered.
The only one I'm aware of that's in the same ballpark is the Atomic Pi, which was apparently a limited production run using heavily discounted surplus components. It's not as popular as you'd expect given the $40 price point, which I assume is because there isn't anything like the same level of community support that the Raspberry Pi has.
Used Celeron NUCs are not more expensive, and they are way more powerful.
To me, they aren't always a better fit than an Rpi, but they often are.
Well, it's a Pentium 4 with 2GB DDR2 RAM... You may wish to search around a bit.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Optiplex-745-PC-SFF-Desktop-In...
HP T620 workstation ~$45 plus shipping?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-T620-Dual-Core-AMD-Gx217Ga-1-65G...
We can easily compare that on Linux with benchmarks. I'd say at the same price point for used x86, x86 is still much faster.
[1] https://hejdom.pl/blog/22-home-assistant/208-home-assistant-...
The Pis really can do a lot too. Mine hosts a vpn, pihole, calibre-web, and a couple of other basic things. Really the only downside to the ARM based SBCs is they mostly use MicroSD cards, which probably are the greatest bottleneck in the system and mostly likely thing to fail.
Any possibility to transition from enterprise/cloud app dev, but with no comp Eng background?
Hardware-adjacent looks more interesting to me - would you say that I’m right or I’m wrong? :-)
Cheap, robust, solid support and tools. Definitely hit the sweet spot for what we needed.
It's a good target if you want to provide something very close to a "turn-key appliance" without actually selling your own hardware: You can provide an image that a user writes to a microSD card, plugs in, and it just works.
For example: HomeAssistant [1] for home automation, OctoPi [2] 3D printer software, OpenElec [3] media center, RetroPi [4] game console emulator, Volumio [4] music player, and lots more [5].
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation
Better yet - they boot from USB now (and even NVMe if you're using a CM4).
The biggest downside is your PXE server going down is going to kill all the Pis, so if you are doing something important you need a highly-available PXE setup. And if you have that, it's probably a better place to host a lot of the services people use Pis for in the first place.
I've setup a small office with 5 lines + 10 extensions all running on one of those (+ an analog line adapter), and it's been trouble free for the 3-4 year uptime so far.
Sadly, as our usage of the IP phones dwindled (cell phones, texting, and now conference software taking over), my significant other began evicting them from around the house ("too big and ugly"). A couple years ago, my instance was at the point I needed to do some major OS upgrades to it, and considering it was basically my office phone and a cordless left, I ended up retiring the Pi and PBX. Now I just register my last couple phones directly to my VoIP provider.
It looks like a Pi 4 can handle "dozens" of simultaneous channels (though depends on codecs used), and that would be my starting point if I got back into doing PBX work or deploying a system today -- though I'd probably run it from an SSD instead of SD card.
This is a great example of the benefits of the Pi hardware, too: People don't tolerate PBX downtime. With the Pi, it's incredibly cheap to have hardware for a failover server (try pricing that out on a commercial PBX!), and in an emergency you can run out and buy one locally or have it shipped overnight.
It's not mysterious. Making and supporting Raspberry Pis is the Raspberry Pi Foundation's thing. Wandering around in a confused state is Intel's thing.
Not quite direct competition, but pretty close. Maybe more directly similar to the Pi 4CM with a daughter card for NVMe, network, sata, etc.
As a dedicated, small, cheap computer for the “brains” of various hobbies and certain professional projects (at least where reliability isn’t the top concern)? Absolutely.
It’s by far the popular $35 Linux box out there. People create distros for all sorts of use-cases. Off the top of my head:
Pi-hole, RetroPi, Volumio, OctoPrint, Home Assistant, piAware, Plex/Kodi, many more.
Raspberry Pi needs to do two things to become really useful.
1) ship chips with native-AES/hardware crypto
2) get rid of SD and have onboard NAND, like a phone
I’ve raised this on their forums but just get flamed for some reason by senior engineers suggesting that these ideas are ridiculous and it’s for education in Africa, I was even banned for suggesting they were shortsighted.
Maybe education’s where it started, I don’t see why they are blind to the reality that most current users are tinkerers and Linux hobbyists.
I disagree. Having onboard NAND seems like a disadvantage, for like when it goes bad from all the usage.
Should have one M.2 slot.
Normal thing might be to boot from on-board NAND but put real workloads on M.2 if present.
I have to also vote for crypto extensions. The Pi 4 is the only ARM64 I have ever seen that lacks AES and CLMUL. Makes it pretty lame for web serving, router/firewall/VPN gateway, etc.
I would love to know why they chose to exclude this, it couldn’t make a big difference in price could it?
Good.
The last thing we need is profit mad crypto miners buying up every single Pi and we end up with shortages and insane prices just like with gaming GPUs.
Also a free market means people can do with the stuff they buy as they wish.
Whether I mine on it or stick it up my arse is just as valid as you gaming.
The main advantage will be general network ops.
I now understand why the Pi Zero comes standard without the GPIO header.
But it does appear the the GPU has perhaps 2x to 5x the FLOPs of the CPU, albeit with not much in the way of APIs to actually use it.
> 2) get rid of SD and have onboard NAND, like a phone
Why are these important?
Oh dear. That will involve the process of flashing OS onto the Pi and will increase the risk of bricking it. That is the reason for using SD cards instead of a NAND chip.
Secondly, you can't upgrade the storage on it either and would have to choose a RPi with fixed storage space on it. Might as well get a M1 Mac Mini.
I cannot imagine having to choose a future RPi 5 having either a 8GB, 16GB, 32GB NAND' and being unable to upgrade the space on it. So no thanks and no deal to (2).
The SD cards are nice for most use cases, but on some boards I'd really like to see a SATA port or M.2 slot which can be booted from and a x4 PCIe port (even if through an optional board or a HAT).
I see the SD cards on the Raspis as modern floppy discs. They are good to have, but not ideal for some cases.
People have already achieved it by hardware hacking
My hope is the next Pi model B might include an M.2 slot (maybe 42mm long) on the bottom.
Which ones are you seeing with M.2 slots? I've clicked a good 5-8 of the top listings from that list for which it would make sense to have such slot and they're missing it.
But that being said, I've burned out plenty an SD card. Haven't managed to do that to an eMMC module yet.
Also, on devices like the Beaglebone, you can use eMMC and an SD card at the same time.