Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is out!

  • SoC: Broadcom BCM2711B0 quad-core A72 (ARMv8-A) 64-bit @ 1.5GHz
  • GPU: Broadcom VideoCore VI
  • Networking: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless LAN
  • RAM: 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB LPDDR4 SDRAM
  • Bluetooth: Bluetooth 5.0, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
  • GPIO: 40-pin GPIO header, populated
  • Storage: microSD
  • Ports: 2 × micro-HDMI 2.0, 3.5 mm analogue audio-video jack, 2 × USB 2.0, 2 × USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, Camera Serial Interface (CSI), Display Serial Interface (DSI)

What do you think about this beast?
CoreELEC support?
HEVC 10bit support?

  • Very nice overall and it should present a huge performance boost over the older models.
    But with that said, the N2, albeit more expensive, is still much faster. It has more CPU cores, the “Big” cores are newer/faster and the frequency is much higher on the S922X SoC.
  • No plans for that, as far as I’m aware.
  • Supposedly. We’ll have to wait and see if it actually works.
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there’s no mention of vp8/vp9 decoding, vulkan or HDR so presumably it can’t do those and no support for emmc.

Still looks decent though.

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According to this post https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/17698-libreelec-leia-9-2-alpha1-with-raspberry-pi-4b-support/?postID=121518#post121518
10Bit and HDR aren’t working yet. Also, there’s no mention of VP9 support.
And if you look at the price of the total package, the 4B Rpi is about $120, not that much cheaper than an N2.

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yeah that’s why I removed my post :slightly_smiling_face:
HEVC 10bit is a deal breaker for me…

I wonder how is such a quad-core Broadcom CPU compared to the Chinese made quad-core Allwinner H6 found in some inexpensive Android TV Boxes, i.e. New 6K Q plus 4+64GB Android 9.0 Pie Quad Core Smart TV Box WIFI 3D H.265 Media, etc.?

In the uk I’m looking at £100 for a 2GB N2 kit (+ wifi)
https://www.odroid.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&path=239&product_id=886
vs £47 delivered for a 2GB pi4 (+ case@£5 + sd card + psu@£8)
https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b?src=raspberrypi
£100ish vs £60ish

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Another thing worth pointing out is that, compared to S922X boxes, this has no on-board storage. I have my S912 box running off the internal storage and it is very fast compared to cheap SD cards and flash storage that currently flood the market

What are you using eMMC for? Timeshift? PVR? A storage for 4k movies? :slight_smile:
I don’t think most people use eMMC other than just booting the OS.

OS booting AND running :wink:
This means databases access, media cache (images, audio and videos), addons running and for some users docker/entware softwares.

Using the internal emmc for disk intensive tasks is a bad idea because replacing emmc is way harder than replacing a micro SD card. Flash storages have a lifespan so does emmc.

If you don’t use emmc for disk intensive tasks, such as just booting the OS, performance difference is negligible

Replacing eMMC on the Odroid devices is as easy as replacing an sdcard.
That’s another story if it’s soldered on the pcb.

FYI I used an eMMC module on a C2 for more than 2 years with intensive r/w (nginx/php/mariadb in a docker image) together with LE/CE and no issue till now.

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Besides, devices that have no internal storage are unbrickable

If you have an SBC capable of both SD card and eMMC, burn CE to both and compare for yourself. Moving to eMMC is markedly faster than even the best of SD card, for almost every task.

The eMMC on the Odroid is removable. So you can always remove it and burn a new image to it with a USB to eMMC adapter. Or you can boot from a SD card and reinstall the OS onto the eMMC.

In addition, eMMC is far less prone to corruption than SD card.

Oh shit, I checked my device and it’s not Odroid. eMMC is SMD, what should I do now?

Yes removable eMMC is so handy on the N2 I won’t buy a device that has eMMC soldered to the board or none at all. Inexpensive USB drives and SD cards have a dismally high failure rate and I’ve had a few go tango uniform on me. I prefer not to use them as a permanent boot device.

Though if boot from USB becomes more of a standard fare then using a USB SSD might be a good alternative to eMMC. I use Samsung T5 USB SSDs with my notebook computers and they are really nice, super fast and reliable. I get 350 mbyte/s writes on them consistently with large files.

Limited to USB3 speeds hardly seems worth using a SSD - a complete waste. A retired 2.5HDD should be enough and is what I have put in most of my builds.

Shoog

Rasberry’s are not bad little units but moving up into the more serious SBC market i think is going to be tough for them.

Over the years they built not a bad hobby industry competing mostly against low end Atmel boards and had their intial growth in the education industry but with a more serious emerging SBC market i can’t see them carving out much more then what they got. There a great cheap lowend unit with a shallow learning curve which is good for where they were situated in the market mostly competing with things like Arduino’s and other cheap boards. Anyone looking for more features were forced to go up to things like the Beaglebone Blacks or some of the other ST or TI based boards.

Rasberry’s issue for serious hackers/coders has always been the Broadcom cpu’s as Broadcom’s not all that supportative of small independant coders or developers.

ts not that Amlogic or Rockchip is that much better but because there are dozens of makes using the same Amlogic or Rockchip SoC’s it at least creates a much bigger talent pool to pull coders from where as the Raspberry Cpu’s from Broadcom are almost exclusive to Raspberry cutting down on any real hackers on the device.

If they target the cheaper end of the SBC market the same way they targeted Atmel in the lowend market years ago they might have some success, only time will tell.

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