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Posted by afiretruck - Mon 24 Jun 2019 10:15
Suddenly the RPi looks like a very nice low power NAS board, now that it has gigabit ethernet and USB 3.
Posted by Tabbykatze - Mon 24 Jun 2019 10:18
That performance and IO that the RPi is providing now is insane at an excellent price, might nab a 2GB model to upgrade the home theater.
Posted by Kanoe - Mon 24 Jun 2019 10:36
The power requirements are going to make it interesting for trying to run it off batteries :P
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Mon 24 Jun 2019 11:15
Heard about this at 7am, order for a 4GB version was put in by 7:30 :D

Kanoe
The power requirements are going to make it interesting for trying to run it off batteries :P

Power requirements don't seem that much worse than the Pi3 which was already quite power hungry, this seems to have a USB-C connector to cope with plugging in USB peripherals.
Posted by persimmon - Mon 24 Jun 2019 11:54
a 3gb model as well ?? where did that (typo) spring from ..
Very interesting .. would make a very nice NAS /HTPC .. if somebody ported Open source Xpenology onto it. Will w10 still run on this? Or does W10 on ARm need updating .
ISnt the USB-c for powerig the device ?
Posted by 3dcandy - Mon 24 Jun 2019 12:22
Can think of much better boards for use in NAS boxes…
Mine runs off an Atom board for example with 4 x sata ports which cost less than a Rasp Pi
Posted by The Hand - Mon 24 Jun 2019 12:32
I can imagine these appearing a few people's Christmas stockings in 6 months time :thumbsup:
Posted by Disturbedguy - Mon 24 Jun 2019 12:34
I've obviously seen these mentioned on here and other places a few times, what do people actually use them for?
Posted by cheesemp - Mon 24 Jun 2019 13:04
That's a little naughty - No new PI was due this year: https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/raspberry-pi-4-everything-we-know,news-59876.html

Almost bought a 3 last week based off that statement (and I read it elsewhere). Glad I didn't now!
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Mon 24 Jun 2019 13:24
Disturbedguy
I've obviously seen these mentioned on here and other places a few times, what do people actually use them for?

Anywhere that you might think “it would be nice to have a computer controlling that, but it is too expensive/power hungry”.

I have one running Octopi to serve files to my 3D printer, monitor it and make timelapse video recordings of prints.
Companies I have worked at used them to drive status displays on wall mounted TVs, so having two outputs is pretty good for that.
Posted by SHSPVR - Mon 24 Jun 2019 14:07
afiretruck
Suddenly the RPi looks like a very nice low power NAS board, now that it has gigabit ethernet and USB 3.
LoL I hope your joking there only 2 USB 3.
Posted by spacein_vader - Mon 24 Jun 2019 14:54
SHSPVR
LoL I hope your joking there only 2 USB 3.

USB can be daisy chained. Spinning rust won't saturate a USB3 link on its own.
Posted by Kanoe - Mon 24 Jun 2019 14:57
Disturbedguy
I've obviously seen these mentioned on here and other places a few times, what do people actually use them for?

PiHole
Plant Propagator (Measures soil temp, controls a heat mat, measures soil moisture, notifies you if they need watering)
Building a robot to compete in PiWars Link
Posted by Tabbykatze - Mon 24 Jun 2019 15:15
spacein_vader
USB can be daisy chained. Spinning rust won't saturate a USB3 link on its own.

But won't the Random IO be awful because of the latency and Queue depth being tosh?
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Mon 24 Jun 2019 15:31
Tabbykatze
But won't the Random IO be awful because of the latency and Queue depth being tosh?

If you are that serious about NAS you probably want a Ryzen or carefully chose Pentium board for the ECC ram and a big ZFS SATA array as the price of the CPU will be dwarfed by the cost of storage.

But if you want to run eg a Minecraft server, a cheap SSD on a USB to SATA interface might do nicely on one of these Pi boards.


Interesting that it sounds like these are no longer compatible with existing Rasbian images. That's actually quite cool, as that compatibility with the original Pi was really holding the platform back. It does sound like the original Pi can boot the new Pi4 compatible images though, so it looks like they haven't adopted 64 bit yet.
Posted by 3dcandy - Mon 24 Jun 2019 15:44
DanceswithUnix
If you are that serious about NAS you probably want a Ryzen or carefully chose Pentium board for the ECC ram and a big ZFS SATA array as the price of the CPU will be dwarfed by the cost of storage.

But if you want to run eg a Minecraft server, a cheap SSD on a USB to SATA interface might do nicely on one of these Pi boards.


Interesting that it sounds like these are no longer compatible with existing Rasbian images. That's actually quite cool, as that compatibility with the original Pi was really holding the platform back. It does sound like the original Pi can boot the new Pi4 compatible images though, so it looks like they haven't adopted 64 bit yet.

Just about to ZFS my NAS. Hope the 2c4t Atom can cope (it does have 8 gig)
;)
Posted by Tabbykatze - Mon 24 Jun 2019 15:45
DanceswithUnix
If you are that serious about NAS you probably want a Ryzen or carefully chose Pentium board for the ECC ram and a big ZFS SATA array as the price of the CPU will be dwarfed by the cost of storage.

But if you want to run eg a Minecraft server, a cheap SSD on a USB to SATA interface might do nicely on one of these Pi boards.


Interesting that it sounds like these are no longer compatible with existing Rasbian images. That's actually quite cool, as that compatibility with the original Pi was really holding the platform back. It does sound like the original Pi can boot the new Pi4 compatible images though, so it looks like they haven't adopted 64 bit yet.

I run a Supermicro board with a Nehalem Xeon and an LSI MegaRAID, more than capable for small-medium ZFS glusters.

Pi4 having a new Raspbian meaning it can be set up to take advantage of the new hardware.
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Mon 24 Jun 2019 15:53
Tabbykatze
Pi4 having a new Raspbian meaning it can be set up to take advantage of the new hardware.

For years the Pi foundation have been saying they can't break the 1GB limit because upgrading from Vidcore IV would break compatibility. Always seemed a strange argument to me, so nice to see they cracked on with it :D
Posted by SHSPVR - Mon 24 Jun 2019 16:50
spacein_vader
SHSPVR
LoL I hope your joking there only 2 USB 3.

USB can be daisy chained. Spinning rust won't saturate a USB3 link on its own.
Good luck fining device that can daisy chained LoL

USB 3.0 hubs are a PITA. Some work. Some don't so well.
Randomly disconnecting hard drives during a transfer isn't what I consider good behavior.
USB 3.0 and 3.1 technology isn't mature enough yet to rely on when come to Hard Drive or SSD but Thunderbolt can be daisy chained you have wait for USB 4.0.
Posted by watercooled - Mon 24 Jun 2019 18:27
I don't have an Ars account so can't get the rant off my chest there, so you guys will have to bear it: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/the-raspberry-pi-4-launch-site-runs-on-a-pi-4-cluster

Sysbench CPU is a decent metric for estimating real-world performance.
No, no it isn't at all! If you're getting an entire order of magnitude of difference between platforms then you should really be checking why before jumping to conclusions like this. In some cases it might be true, but a sanity-check would tell you there's really not 10x worth of difference in ‘real world performance’ between these cores. Either your numbers are wrong or the benchmark is useless in the context. Sysbench is a pretty poor microbenchmark in general, let alone for comparing across CPU architectures! Even a web browser benchmark would be more useful in terms of ‘real world’ despite the impact software can have.

E.g.
According to Tom's the RasPi 4 on Jetstream 1.1 gets 42.48
My i7 7700 (double the threads and much higher clock than the 8100T) gets 208.58
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Tue 25 Jun 2019 08:03
watercooled
No, no it isn't at all! If you're getting an entire order of magnitude of difference between platforms then you should really be checking why before jumping to conclusions like this.

It seems to be a prime number benchmark that largely tests division. A site where CPU benchmarks always start with the similarly meaningless PiFast probably isn't the best place to rant :D

Edit: I see Tom's Hardware got an overclock up to 1.75GHz on the CPU.
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Tue 25 Jun 2019 10:11
Yay, my Pi 4 4GB just turned up. Only paid the cheapskate postage as well (from The Pi Hut).
Posted by Tabbykatze - Tue 25 Jun 2019 12:27
DanceswithUnix
Yay, my Pi 4 4GB just turned up. Only paid the cheapskate postage as well (from The Pi Hut).

What's your first plan to do with it?
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Tue 25 Jun 2019 12:56
Tabbykatze
What's your first plan to do with it?

Initially, just have a play with it. I need to make a test system for work though, was going to try a Pi 3 but this should make the project easier.

Was also slightly worried that they would go out of stock quite quickly. Sounds like most of the production is 2GB, but that makes no sense to me. Either you want the cheapest, or you want the best, I can't see a point in the middle ground.
Posted by Tabbykatze - Tue 25 Jun 2019 13:08
DanceswithUnix
Initially, just have a play with it. I need to make a test system for work though, was going to try a Pi 3 but this should make the project easier.

Was also slightly worried that they would go out of stock quite quickly. Sounds like most of the production is 2GB, but that makes no sense to me. Either you want the cheapest, or you want the best, I can't see a point in the middle ground.

Well I guess we'll find out what is the most popular and substantial amount of people managed to do so much with just 1GB, 2GB is a massive doubling. Maybe 4GB is just too much and they're scoping for people having big projects but a lot might not need that.

Personally, I'll be going for a 2GB because 90% of what I do can happily sit on 2GB.
Posted by spacein_vader - Tue 25 Jun 2019 13:40
I've always intended to make my pi-hole a hardware firewall but held fire because the ethernet ran off the usb bus so wasn't puicj enough to handle all the network traffic.

Now the Pi4 is true gigabit and I can use a usb3-ethernet adaptor to a second port if needed I either need to find easier to use software or learn how to setup pfsense.
Posted by Tabbykatze - Tue 25 Jun 2019 13:56
spacein_vader
I've always intended to make my pi-hole a hardware firewall but held fire because the ethernet ran off the usb bus so wasn't puicj enough to handle all the network traffic.

Now the Pi4 is true gigabit and I can use a usb3-ethernet adaptor to a second port if needed I either need to find easier to use software or learn how to setup pfsense.

I use Sophos XG Home on a J1900 with an RPi as a PiHole attached off it in my DMZ.

I'd worry that the proper Linux distros for doing hardware firewalls aren't fully compatible with ARM with the exception of dd-wrt?
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Tue 25 Jun 2019 14:55
Tabbykatze
Personally, I'll be going for a 2GB because 90% of what I do can happily sit on 2GB.

But there's that worry that you find yourself running low on RAM thinking if only I bought the bigger one.

If you use the dual screen ability, I think that's potentially half a gig gone right there (not tried reconfiguring graphics memory yet). Then you might want to have a big tmpfs to keep data away from the slow SD card if processing files.

If you are buying a classroom full of them, then the cost saving would add up.
Posted by peterb - Tue 25 Jun 2019 16:43
Tabbykatze
Personally, I'll be going for a 2GB because 90% of what I do can happily sit on 2GB.

What about the other 10% then?
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Tue 25 Jun 2019 17:43
peterb
What about the other 10% then?

I would guess 5% wouldn't fit in 4GB either :)

So it could be argued that the extra tenner for 4GB is better put towards a £15 120GB SSD (Amazon really do have them starting that cheap) and £8 for a USB3 to SATA cable so you can give it a 16GB swap partition.

But then for another tenner you could have 4GB of ram to cache all that swap into :D
Posted by watercooled - Tue 25 Jun 2019 18:17
DanceswithUnix
It seems to be a prime number benchmark that largely tests division. A site where CPU benchmarks always start with the similarly meaningless PiFast probably isn't the best place to rant :D

Edit: I see Tom's Hardware got an overclock up to 1.75GHz on the CPU.
I've had my moan about that too. ;)

I wonder if the version of the A72 on this RasPi's CPU comes without an optional block for example (the cores are configurable in some ways)? Or maybe it's just down to a compile option somewhere along the line? I seem to recall reading that due to backwards compatibility, the stock firmware image is still 32 bit, I wonder if that might have something to do with it too?

Tabbykatze
What's your first plan to do with it?
I have two RasPi boards next to me, one V2 and one V3 IIRC, doing nothing much at present. But I'm sure a RasPi 4 could do that *even better*!!!
Yeah I'll probably end up buying one, playing with it for a bit and adding it to the collection. :(
Posted by peterb - Tue 25 Jun 2019 21:27
DanceswithUnix
I would guess 5% wouldn't fit in 4GB either :)

So it could be argued that the extra tenner for 4GB is better put towards a £15 120GB SSD (Amazon really do have them starting that cheap) and £8 for a USB3 to SATA cable so you can give it a 16GB swap partition.

But then for another tenner you could have 4GB of ram to cache all that swap into :D

I think that’s called ‘upselling’ :p
Posted by Tabbykatze - Tue 25 Jun 2019 22:10
Goddamit I'm trying not to spend more money but your arguments are so well form it is like a spear through my wallet.

Well…4GB is on pre-order is suppose…
Posted by edgars70 - Wed 26 Jun 2019 00:11
spacein_vader
I've always intended to make my pi-hole a hardware firewall but held fire because the ethernet ran off the usb bus so wasn't puicj enough to handle all the network traffic.

I have been using a Pi Model B with 256 mem for a few years and it runs Pi Hole well. It does not slow down your network or your internet access. It is only the DNS requests that are being processed by the Pi. Your downloads, for instance, do not go through the Rpis ethernet port.
Posted by spacein_vader - Wed 26 Jun 2019 06:40
edgars70
I have been using a Pi Model B with 256 mem for a few years and it runs Pi Hole well. It does not slow down your network or your internet access. It is only the DNS requests that are being processed by the Pi. Your downloads, for instance, do not go through the Rpis ethernet port.

Apologies, I wasn't clear. I've had a Pi2 model B running Pi-hole for a couple of years, I'm aware the network traffic just for doing DNS is minimal enough not to saturate the ethernet.

I'm saying I'd like the Pi to double up as a hardware firewall for my whole network. To do that all the internet traffic will need to run through it and that will require more bandwidth than previous Pis could handle.

The new one seems ideal for that.
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Wed 26 Jun 2019 07:31
watercooled
I wonder if the version of the A72 on this RasPi's CPU comes without an optional block for example (the cores are configurable in some ways)? Or maybe it's just down to a compile option somewhere along the line? I seem to recall reading that due to backwards compatibility, the stock firmware image is still 32 bit, I wonder if that might have something to do with it too?

I think in this case it is just that division is usually a rarely used instruction so ARM didn't waste too much silicon area on it. It's self fulfilling too, there is an old compiler trick to try and replace divides with multiplies because multiplies are always faster, and when people pull tricks like that it makes spending transistor budget on the divider less appealing. Then there is the TDP advantage of the 8300 which gives it double the clock speed.

OTOH, Intel make mahoosive cores and wouldn't blink at implementing very fast dividers, though even Intel only implement one of them for integer (Coffee Lake only has a divider on port 0. yeah I looked it up: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/coffee_lake )

It Ars had done their graph against an Atom chip, that would have seemed a more reasonable match.
Posted by watercooled - Wed 26 Jun 2019 18:19
I did originally mention a hardware divider in my post before I edited it out - I wasn't sure if that would have applied here, but I do remember hearing about inclusion/omission of the dividers around the AMD Stars cores IIRC? Something like the original K10 core (e.g. Thuban) didn't have them but the version used in Llano did.
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Wed 26 Jun 2019 19:14
If Llano had an upgraded divider, I never noticed :D

ISTR it is one of those cases where you trade off transistors used against how many bits per clock cycle it can work out, so there are various levels.

Interesting tables here if you search for idiv 32 or 64 bit you can see how the latency improves over the generations: https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf

But performance only improves for software that uses the divide instruction (Amdahl's law), for other code it is just a waste of area which hurts clock speed!


Edit: I mentioned A72 vs Atom above, but it sounds like the Llano divider was used in the Jaguar as well so it must have been area and power effective.
Posted by DanceswithUnix - Wed 26 Jun 2019 20:59
Pi Hut have apparently sold out of 4GB models.