The modern Pi's have a Debian install that more-or-less supports OpenGL, so there's a lot you can do by adding a 5" screen or touchscreen. There's a site Adafruit that has a bunch of boards (e.g. motion sensors, joysticks). Couple it with a 3D printer and you can make all sorts of portable devices.
Just goes to show that you need to keep your Pi patched, and beware of what networks you connect it to (either unsecured, or then transitioning it to a secured network).
Also, use good passwords or secure your keys, if you enable SSH logins.
AFAIK they said the Pi itself was unauthorised. This could be taken to mean someone physically planted a Pi in order to get remote access to the network. Alternatively I could see it being some engineer's "unauthorised" pet project that got forgotten about and hijacked. Not sure which would be easier to pull off, but my instinct says bribing a janitor vs gaining remote access to a machine you don't know exists that's undoubtedly behind a firewall.
As I implied, another scenario is that the engineer had the Pi on an unsecured network (perhaps at home), at which point it got hijacked.
Or, even if the Pi was always on a secured network, perhaps its security updates weren't promptly applied and it got hijacked via browser or some similar exploit.
Same. I went to multiple sites but can't find any useful projects for me. I would have love this back then as a NAS and/or HTPC solution but I don't need those capabilities anymore and plenty of alternatives for most applications.
This one should be good enough for browsing and video watching instead of firing up the desktop (save power and AC costs).
My dumb self bought a 3b+ just weeks ago, well I now know why it was very cheap. ;) I use it for Pihole which is a ad blocker on network (DNS) level. Any device in your home network will get ad blocking. IMHO especially helpful for mobile devices that don't have that many options for such browser plugins on mobile.
"...GPU performance are still the worst in this class of device"
Depends on what you are doing. Pi 4 probably can't hold a match to the Jetson Nano ($100) in OpenGL or Vulkan, but VideoCore's native dispmanx API is pretty powerful and much simpler for bare metal 2D composition, scaling, and layering. That is probably why the Pi is so popular for retro gaming. The faster CPU on the Pi 4 vs Nano doesn't hurt either.
I get the sense that the GPU SW support isn't fully baked yet. I assume Broadcom is holding to its VideoCore IP for cost reasons, but maintaining OpenGL and (future?) Vulkan drivers can't be cheap either, and it's hard to see them approaching the maturity of NVIDIA.
It's not a driver/software maturity thing, ultimately. This is a low-budget 28 nm SoC. They probably burned most of the die area on the A72 cores and didn't have enough room left to significantly enlarge the GPU. That's my guess, anyhow.
This review reports that the GPU drivers are now open source. If that is the case, then GPU performance will likely improve over time....could be months though.
More likely years. OpenGL performance with the open-source drivers for VideoCore is horrid, and the proprietary driver requires a horrid proprietary API to be used instead of supporting standard EGL/GLES interfaces.
Even if it's hampered by a bad driver (and I believe VC6 uses a different driver than VC4), it still sounds like compute performance isn't much about 100 GFLOPS, which is a factor of 5 below what upper-end mobile SoCs manage.
Also, I think the DDR4L data width is probably rather narrow. So, let's hope VC6 has some decent amount of cache and does tiled rendering.
The advantage of 28nm is totally gonna be the maturity of the node and overclocking potential. With an active cooler this thing will likely hit 2.0+GHz with an optimized scheduler
The Pi4 is a significant step up from the Pi3, and while onboard storage is limited to microSD (however, notably faster than before), the Pi4 has real USB 3, and can be run from an external SSD. The biggest reason for me to wait right now is the lack of good ways to play video. Once I can run Kodi or similar on it, I'm in. Last, but not least, the Raspberry Foundation delivered the Pi4 on spec and ahead of schedule - nice.
Not right now, because lots of Retroarch isn't set up for the A72/RPi4 hardware yet.
And when it is ready, a new one is only $30-60 - a few takeaway meals.
I've got an RPi3 that I'm keeping for retro gaming, but I might be tempted to get an RPI4 with 4gb of RAM - or maybe a couple, over a couple of months, to test out Docker and other 'current' stack setups that I can't really test at work at the moment due to a huuuuuuge legacy stack I work with.
Well I purchase 2 Raspberry PI want to help out some Autism Youth. But I found that it was a challenge making it work -it not for average person, but it is a good tech project for people interested in electronics. Right now the Pi's are in container with others similar devices like Adreno's, I don't expect that these will be widespread just because of there nature. Somebody smart could create a kid am as smart home video machine with software fully loaded and tested similar to Android boxes
The move to micro HDMI is a _serious_ misstep. That connector is very fragile and doesn't hold a connection properly even with high quality cables unless you have some sort of mechanism to clamp the cable in place - HDMI cables are too thick and heavy for it. I get the desire for dual displays, but could they at least have made one full size? I also understand that going USB-C DP alt mode is likely too expensive (does the SoC even output a DP signal?), but almost anything is better than micro HDMI.
I've been trying to get some info out of the RPi group but I've not been able to.
they won't say who fabs the BCM2711 on 28nm, my guess is TSMC, but not sure. the VideoCore VI @500Mhz, won't say how many cores are in the GPU in total. the USB-C port is it only wired for power? is the USB-C port properly USB-PD compliant (my guess is that it is because it's using the 5v3a base PD spec)
would like to know these things, but the foundation don't want to let the info out :P
I believe in the forum thread on this it was mentioned that the USB-C is hooked up to the USB 2.0 controller, and they want to get it booting from that, but they maybe don't have that baked yet.
It's interesting that this SoC uses four Cortex-A72 rather than the smaller and similarly-performing A73 cores.
It's also interesting the they manage to sell the Raspi 4 at $55 for the 4GB model, while, e.g., the RockPro64 (with 2 A72 + 4 A53) and the Odroid N2 (with 4 A73 + 2 A53) cost quite a bit more with 4GB; and the Odroid N2 is also quite a bit more expensive than the Odroid C2. The Rockpro64 and Odroid N2 are also quite a big bigger and allow or include better cooling. I guess they use the increased board space for more/better connectors, but I have not checked. One difference is that the Raspi4 will keep its 32-bit ecosystem for compatibility back to the first Raspi, while the other SBCs primarily support 64-bit software.
"This update replaces the old Cortex-A53 CPU cores with cores from Arm’s much faster high-performance line of out-of-order execution cores"
Which probably will make Raspberry Pi vulnerable for attacks like Specter and Meltdown (and many other attacks of the same type). Would be especially bad in some very common use cases, like mediaserver or some iot-duties, since the performance hits will be much worse when the network is accessed. This was something Rasperry Pi wasn't affected by since the former CPU:S didn't have out-of-order execution. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-...
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65 Comments
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mooninite - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Cool! Unfortunately I don't know what I would do with one. Project ideas?PixyMisa - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Try to take over the world?PrettySammy - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Try it if you dare, Misa!SleepyCatChris - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
RetroPie https://retropie.org.uk/Rigorm0rt1s - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Radius serverstephenbrooks - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
The modern Pi's have a Debian install that more-or-less supports OpenGL, so there's a lot you can do by adding a 5" screen or touchscreen. There's a site Adafruit that has a bunch of boards (e.g. motion sensors, joysticks). Couple it with a 3D printer and you can make all sorts of portable devices.mode_13h - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
I'm still trying to find out the level of OpenGL support, on this.I really hope it has decent OpenCL support, as well.
voicequal - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
The official site advertises OpenGL ES 3.0 on the Pi 4.https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-...
mode_13h - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Hmmm... I hope that's not the highest it can support.mode_13h - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
Compute shaders weren't added until GS ES 3.1.mode_13h - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Home media streamer/server. That's what mine does.nandnandnand - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Stream video/audio, listen to it with Bluetooth 5 headphones.micahmoorenabob - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Didn't a guy just hack NASA with one or something...mode_13h - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
I think it was a Pi on the network that was hacked, and then presumably used as a stepping stone for hacking other machines on the network.mode_13h - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Just goes to show that you need to keep your Pi patched, and beware of what networks you connect it to (either unsecured, or then transitioning it to a secured network).Also, use good passwords or secure your keys, if you enable SSH logins.
csutcliff - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
AFAIK they said the Pi itself was unauthorised. This could be taken to mean someone physically planted a Pi in order to get remote access to the network. Alternatively I could see it being some engineer's "unauthorised" pet project that got forgotten about and hijacked. Not sure which would be easier to pull off, but my instinct says bribing a janitor vs gaining remote access to a machine you don't know exists that's undoubtedly behind a firewall.mode_13h - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
As I implied, another scenario is that the engineer had the Pi on an unsecured network (perhaps at home), at which point it got hijacked.Or, even if the Pi was always on a secured network, perhaps its security updates weren't promptly applied and it got hijacked via browser or some similar exploit.
zodiacfml - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
Same. I went to multiple sites but can't find any useful projects for me. I would have love this back then as a NAS and/or HTPC solution but I don't need those capabilities anymore and plenty of alternatives for most applications.koaschten - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
https://pi-hole.net/ - best I did for my sanity while websurfing at home.zodiacfml - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
interesting suggestion. i'll probably run this through ubuntu while double as network storage for my IP camera. thanksslickcity - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
Hack NASA?Sauce: https://thenextweb.com/security/2019/06/24/a-hacke...
koaschten - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
https://pi-hole.net/ - best I did for my sanity while websurfing at home.beginner99 - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
This one should be good enough for browsing and video watching instead of firing up the desktop (save power and AC costs).My dumb self bought a 3b+ just weeks ago, well I now know why it was very cheap. ;) I use it for Pihole which is a ad blocker on network (DNS) level. Any device in your home network will get ad blocking. IMHO especially helpful for mobile devices that don't have that many options for such browser plugins on mobile.
AthlonFever - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
Hack into NASAlmcd - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Disappointing it launched without a way to store UEFI/bootloader onboard, but RPi seems to be "infallible" at this pointStormyParis - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
There is a way to store a bootloader onboard: stick a micro-SD in it.Some people just whine, whine, whine.
voicequal - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Pi 4 has a 512KB EEPROM for boot code.https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware...
lmcd - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
I would've thought it'd be more prominently advertised, but this is great, thanks for posting!mode_13h - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Too bad the storage and GPU performance are still the worst in this class of device. Otherwise, there are some nice upgrades, in here.It'll be interesting to see how much it's hampered by thermal throttling.
nandnandnand - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Are you paying $35-55 for the "best in class" device?mode_13h - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
They could put eMMC in the $55 version. Certainly, some competing devices have it, in that price range.At $46, the ODROID-C2 takes the approach of putting eMMC on a pluggable module. To see what difference it makes, check out their benchmarks:
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c2/
mode_13h - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
The PINE H64 rev B has an eMMC module slot at only $36.voicequal - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
USB 3.0 attached solid state storage on the Pi 4 should outperform eMMC. This test shows speeds of ~350MB/s:https://medium.com/@ghalfacree/benchmarking-the-ra...
Samus - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
^^^voicequal - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
"...GPU performance are still the worst in this class of device"Depends on what you are doing. Pi 4 probably can't hold a match to the Jetson Nano ($100) in OpenGL or Vulkan, but VideoCore's native dispmanx API is pretty powerful and much simpler for bare metal 2D composition, scaling, and layering. That is probably why the Pi is so popular for retro gaming. The faster CPU on the Pi 4 vs Nano doesn't hurt either.
I get the sense that the GPU SW support isn't fully baked yet. I assume Broadcom is holding to its VideoCore IP for cost reasons, but maintaining OpenGL and (future?) Vulkan drivers can't be cheap either, and it's hard to see them approaching the maturity of NVIDIA.
mode_13h - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
It's not a driver/software maturity thing, ultimately. This is a low-budget 28 nm SoC. They probably burned most of the die area on the A72 cores and didn't have enough room left to significantly enlarge the GPU. That's my guess, anyhow.voicequal - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
This review reports that the GPU drivers are now open source. If that is the case, then GPU performance will likely improve over time....could be months though.https://blog.hackster.io/meet-the-new-raspberry-pi...
mode_13h - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
Yeah, but I'm concerned the theoretical performance is still quite low.The driver isn't exactly new. Phoronix has been reporting on the VideoCore V driver for almost 2 years.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&...
And the VC6 driver for over 1 year: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&...
And they merged into the V3D driver, not long after that: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&a...
So, it's not as if it's totally immature software. Presumably, it leveraged quite a bit of the open source VC4 code, as well.
nevcairiel - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
More likely years. OpenGL performance with the open-source drivers for VideoCore is horrid, and the proprietary driver requires a horrid proprietary API to be used instead of supporting standard EGL/GLES interfaces.voicequal - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
I can confirm that EGL & OpenGL ES 2.0 do work on VideoCore 4 with the proprietary driver. You just have to get a native element using this method:https://benosteen.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/using-o...
mode_13h - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
Even if it's hampered by a bad driver (and I believe VC6 uses a different driver than VC4), it still sounds like compute performance isn't much about 100 GFLOPS, which is a factor of 5 below what upper-end mobile SoCs manage.Also, I think the DDR4L data width is probably rather narrow. So, let's hope VC6 has some decent amount of cache and does tiled rendering.
Samus - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
The advantage of 28nm is totally gonna be the maturity of the node and overclocking potential. With an active cooler this thing will likely hit 2.0+GHz with an optimized schedulereastcoast_pete - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
The Pi4 is a significant step up from the Pi3, and while onboard storage is limited to microSD (however, notably faster than before), the Pi4 has real USB 3, and can be run from an external SSD. The biggest reason for me to wait right now is the lack of good ways to play video. Once I can run Kodi or similar on it, I'm in. Last, but not least, the Raspberry Foundation delivered the Pi4 on spec and ahead of schedule - nice.mode_13h - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
Yeah, it's nearly a month until Euro Pi day! What gives?vice350z - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
is it even worth sending back the Pi 3B+ i just got to run RetroPie and more graphically intense roms?Beany2013 - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
Not right now, because lots of Retroarch isn't set up for the A72/RPi4 hardware yet.And when it is ready, a new one is only $30-60 - a few takeaway meals.
I've got an RPi3 that I'm keeping for retro gaming, but I might be tempted to get an RPI4 with 4gb of RAM - or maybe a couple, over a couple of months, to test out Docker and other 'current' stack setups that I can't really test at work at the moment due to a huuuuuuge legacy stack I work with.
HStewart - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link
Well I purchase 2 Raspberry PI want to help out some Autism Youth. But I found that it was a challenge making it work -it not for average person, but it is a good tech project for people interested in electronics. Right now the Pi's are in container with others similar devices like Adreno's, I don't expect that these will be widespread just because of there nature. Somebody smart could create a kid am as smart home video machine with software fully loaded and tested similar to Android boxesZingam - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
What is the situation with the graphics stack? Does it support in hardware Vulkan 1.1, OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL, etc all the things that matter?Zingam - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
And AV1 decode?nevcairiel - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
Its Broadcom VideoCore still, so no, its still useless.mode_13h - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
No, not much can decode AV1.mode_13h - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
I've found that Vulkan and OpenCL support are planned, while OpenGL ES 3.0 is currently advertised.It sounds like we'll get OpenGL ES Compute shaders, before we get OpenCL, though.
badbanana - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
as a portable computer, i find the lack of a portable power source hinders its portability.Beany2013 - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
It's not a portable computer, it's a single board computer.If you want it to be a portable computer, however.....
https://thepihut.com/products/pi-top-v2-raspberry-...
I'd expect the chassis to be updated to support the RPI4 soon.
mode_13h - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
It burns rather a lot of power, for portable use. It idles at over 3 W!Valantar - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
The move to micro HDMI is a _serious_ misstep. That connector is very fragile and doesn't hold a connection properly even with high quality cables unless you have some sort of mechanism to clamp the cable in place - HDMI cables are too thick and heavy for it. I get the desire for dual displays, but could they at least have made one full size? I also understand that going USB-C DP alt mode is likely too expensive (does the SoC even output a DP signal?), but almost anything is better than micro HDMI.mode_13h - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
Sounds like a good question. Maybe ask it in the AMA I linked below.Mobile-Dom - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
I've been trying to get some info out of the RPi group but I've not been able to.they won't say who fabs the BCM2711 on 28nm, my guess is TSMC, but not sure.
the VideoCore VI @500Mhz, won't say how many cores are in the GPU in total.
the USB-C port is it only wired for power?
is the USB-C port properly USB-PD compliant (my guess is that it is because it's using the 5v3a base PD spec)
would like to know these things, but the foundation don't want to let the info out :P
GreenReaper - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link
I believe in the forum thread on this it was mentioned that the USB-C is hooked up to the USB 2.0 controller, and they want to get it booting from that, but they maybe don't have that baked yet.mode_13h - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
If anyone has questions, there's an AMA with the Pi's creator: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-a...Tom's new forum software is kind of buggy. If you login to the page with the thread, it won't let you post. You should do your login here:
https://forums.tomshardware.com/
Then, proceed to the AMA thread.
Samus - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
It's amazing how cheap this thing actually is. Mid-range smartphone internals (essentially a smartphone without a screen\camera\battery) for $55?AntonErtl - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
It's interesting that this SoC uses four Cortex-A72 rather than the smaller and similarly-performing A73 cores.It's also interesting the they manage to sell the Raspi 4 at $55 for the 4GB model, while, e.g., the RockPro64 (with 2 A72 + 4 A53) and the Odroid N2 (with 4 A73 + 2 A53) cost quite a bit more with 4GB; and the Odroid N2 is also quite a bit more expensive than the Odroid C2. The Rockpro64 and Odroid N2 are also quite a big bigger and allow or include better cooling. I guess they use the increased board space for more/better connectors, but I have not checked. One difference is that the Raspi4 will keep its 32-bit ecosystem for compatibility back to the first Raspi, while the other SBCs primarily support 64-bit software.
Threska - Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - link
Backwards compatibility with all the HATS is the main reason for that. Otherwise they could have gone with a bigger board.Magnus101 - Saturday, June 29, 2019 - link
"This update replaces the old Cortex-A53 CPU cores with cores from Arm’s much faster high-performance line of out-of-order execution cores"Which probably will make Raspberry Pi vulnerable for attacks like Specter and Meltdown (and many other attacks of the same type).
Would be especially bad in some very common use cases, like mediaserver or some iot-duties, since the performance hits will be much worse when the network is accessed.
This was something Rasperry Pi wasn't affected by since the former CPU:S didn't have out-of-order execution.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-...
mode_13h - Sunday, June 30, 2019 - link
How do you know the new Pi hasn't been patched in hardware? If not, its kernel will certainly have the patch.