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Comment by john_alan | Hacker News Reader

Yep agree.

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.

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> 2) get rid of SD and have onboard NAND, like a phone

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).

I agree, I have enough bad experience with on-board NAND from other SBCs; it's no fun at all.

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.

I personally would not trade the hat real estate for an M.2 slot in most use cases. I use that hat slot for peripherals that enable unique and fun applications. Micro SD is horribly unreliable, but idk what the solution is without trading a significant amount of space.

M.2 is the way

People have already achieved it by hardware hacking

Hardware hacking not necessary if you use the Compute Module 4; many boards are already integrating M.2 slots: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

My hope is the next Pi model B might include an M.2 slot (maybe 42mm long) on the bottom.

> many boards are already integrating M.2 slots: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

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.

Just because there's onboard storage doesn't mean they couldn't still give it an M.2 or something. And you can install an OS just fine by booting off USB, just as you'd do with any other computer.

The compute modules have a DFU mode and the flash tool loads a small binary to effectively turn it into a USB stick to write to the internal flash.

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.

On lots of pine boards you can flip a switch or short some pins to prevent the bootrom from using the SPI flash or eMMC. The SPI is not removable, but flashing a bad payload to it is not an unrecoverable error.

The BeagleBoneBlack has eMMC and an SD card and a hardware switch to force it to boot off the SD card. Plus, flash is rarely really bricked, you can just hook it up to an SPI bus...

If the Pi can still boot from USB, then you can re-flash the NAND. No chance of bricking it.

>onboard NAND.

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.

These aren't mutually exclusive. I would vote for onboard NAND and an M.2 slot, and perhaps also a jumper or something to select which to boot from.

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.

Yep lack of crypto makes it dog slow for so many things. Including running a little Monero node or whatever.

I would love to know why they chose to exclude this, it couldn’t make a big difference in price could it?

> Yep lack of crypto makes it dog slow for so many things. Including running a little Monero node or whatever.

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.

He said node not miner. There is no way a Pi even with AES could possibly be worth running as a miner.

Running a node is about seeding the chain not mining, ofc.

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.

Doesn't change the fact I'm glad they excluded features that make it unfavourable to crypto people - for any reason - so that I can buy a pi for what it's intended for at a decent price instead of wondering if people are buying them to shove them up their arse.

Crypto extensions will never make the rpi even remotely cost competitive with even very old GPUs.

The main advantage will be general network ops.

> Whether I mine on it or stick it up my arse is just as valid as you gaming.

I now understand why the Pi Zero comes standard without the GPIO header.

Well, that's no fun.

Have you seen the new firefly rk3568 offering? They have lots of I/O including an M.2 slot and SATA port.

Never heard of firefly. I've looked into it and I might get one with 8GB RAM. Thanks.

Fair warning: the rk3568/rk3566 platform is very young. You may want to be sure that upstream uboot and Linux support the board before ordering. But the hardware looks promising.

What's so important about hardware crypto? For me, the real game-changer would be some type of better GPGPU support on existing and future devices. Most of the FLOPs are in the GPU and it's not very practical to use it for compute due to lack of drivers and APIs.

Hardware crypto has an incredibly low gate count, and essentially all network communication requires crypto. Without it, you waste the (much more power and die-space intensive) CPU on AES.

There aren't a lot of flops at all in the RPi GPU, though. They probably want some sort of Neural Network inference engine, both because it is easy enough and makes for good educational content.

It turns out to be a difficult question to answer as to the number of FLOPs of the Pi 4 GPU, see here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=244519

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.

> 1) ship chips with native-AES/hardware crypto

> 2) get rid of SD and have onboard NAND, like a phone

Why are these important?

At least for 1) hardware accelerated encryption/decryption makes many things faster. Even just browsing the web.

Rpi does seem to have already split to serve two different use cases. The normal board for hobby/educational purposes, and the compute module for embedded "real" use. That works for #2. I suspect #1 depends a lot on what Broadcom can give them at a price point that preserves the Rpi history of being dirt cheap.

Got to have proper power section first. The left-bottom section. And designated external power headers rather than the USB or GPIO backfeeding(PoE pins might work for that already?). Some claims the chronic SD card longevity issue in all Pi is coming from dirty power Pi feeds.

Linux hobbyists have plenty of boards to chose from, even before Pi existed like the Beagle Board.

There are plenty of SBCs with AES support.

yep but not with Raspbian and the community, or wifi, or ...

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