Raspberry Pi 4 available, touts '3x performance' boost

[3dcandy]

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)

[Tabbykatze]

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.

[DanceswithUnix]

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

[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.

[watercooled]

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-...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

[DanceswithUnix]

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

Edit: I see Tom's Hardware got an overclock up to 1.75GHz on the CPU.

[DanceswithUnix]

Yay, my Pi 4 4GB just turned up. Only paid the cheapskate postage as well (from The Pi Hut).

[Tabbykatze]

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?

[DanceswithUnix]

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.

[Tabbykatze]

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.

[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.

[Tabbykatze]

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?

[DanceswithUnix]

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.

[peterb]

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?

[DanceswithUnix]

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

[watercooled]

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

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?

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.