Review Raspberry Pi 4 Review: The New Gold Standard for Single-Board Computing

bit_user

Polypheme
Ambassador
I'm pretty sure your table has the GPU specs swapped. It says the Pi 3 has a 500 MHz VidCore VI and the Pi 4 has a 400 MHz VidCore IV.

Speaking of the GPU, I'm really interested in support for OpenCL, Vulkan, and which OpenGL version it supports. Any other specs on the GPU would also be welcome!

I should add that I'm actually a bit disappointed by the OpenArena benchmark. Given how old and slow the earlier Pis' GPU was (yes, even the Pi 3 used the same GPU as the original model that launched in 2012, just clocked a bit higher), I fully expected a much bigger jump. Think about how far desktop GPUs have come in that time - since Nvidia's GeForce 600 series and AMD's HD 7000 series.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: TJ Hooker

bit_user

Polypheme
Ambassador
Any plans on comparing the atomic PI to the raspberry?
It's based on x86 so it would be much more compatible with what people need to run.
https://dlidirect.com/products/atomic-pi
Overall, I think the Pi 4 would definitely win. The Atomic's SoC was designed for cell phones, that were none too popular. The Cortex-A72 cores in the Pi 4 are a bit newer and more efficient. Also, the Atomic Pi uses single-channel DDR3L, while the Pi 4 uses DDR4L.

Of course, the Pi 4's biggest weakness remains storage. So, for I/O intensive tasks, the Atomic would still pull out some wins.
 

LordConrad

Distinguished
It'll be a nice change to have the support of the Raspberry Pi community AND a fast SBC to go with it. I never bought any of their previous SBCs because, for an extra $10-20, their competitors were always much better.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bit_user

punkncat

Champion
Ambassador
The Atomic Pi was dead before it was put up for sale....just somebody flipping old stock and system pulls from a mini-robot product. You won't be seeing support or new iterations of that platform--not from the purported manufacturer, at any rate.


Agreed.

I was taken in at first by all the promise and claims being made. Really glad I waited to purchase one until more detail came out.
It seems that in addition to a fairly high fail rate, there are significant problems with audio, the well known poorly dealt with power delivery, as well as issues running "heavy" OS like it was purported to be capable of.
The lack of possible future support was the final straw for me. This is a once it's gone, it's gone kind of thing. The whole thing was made for a different purpose and has connectors and functionality that, as of yet are (mostly) unknown and unable to be utilized.

Many of the reviewers stated that even though the audio and OS issues were mostly resolvable that the time spent doing so outweighed the value. By and large the consensus among many of the purchasers was to go RPi for the community, the support, and the I/O functionality.
 

technome79

Reputable
Jun 24, 2019
4
0
4,510
The article mentions "true Gigabit Ethernet ". What is true gigabit ethernet? And what makes other gigabit ethernet false?
 
I never really did a drill-down into the specs before pre-ordering 2 of the model 4s, and it now occurs to me that I really am hoping that RPF decided to add a lucid soft power switch facility to the board.

I suppose I could actually look to see, but that would spoil the surprise. Nevertheless, if they didn't, the old method of adding a soft-power button will likely still work.
 

AlistairAB

Distinguished
May 21, 2014
229
60
18,760
Odroid N2 looks nice. Anyone have a Snapdragon 845 single board computer for a low cost? $450 for the Thundercomm one... ouch...

The new Pi4 might beat/equal the nVidia nano now in CPU performance, wild.
 
I'm wondering about the performance, too.....

My dad needed a computer on his desk at the local Senior's Center, where he is their VP, but the lady who is President is a bit of a snit (total control freak, actually) about things on the desks in the office.

She outlined an area on his desk that was no larger than an LCD monitor, and said that's all he was allocated to use, because anything larger would be "ugly". SMH

I screwed a nicely cased Pi-B3+ onto the back of an LCD monitor, hooked it up and gave him a wireless keyboard and mouse combo that he can lock in his desk drawer, and he's been deliriously happy about it ever since. I'm sure the fact that the President is green around the gills over it, doesn't hurt, either. ;)

I've used it a few times (maintenance tasks, for the most part) and do see a bit of a lack in performance with a few things, but I'm used to much more horse power out of a desktop system.

I'm now looking forward to swapping-out the old board for the new one, and seeing what sort of difference it makes in terms of performance.
 
  • Like
Reactions: King_V

R_1

Expert
Ambassador
how about putting the price of the unit reviewed rather than the price of the cheapest variant?
you tested and reviewed the 55 dollar 4GB unit, but list the price as 35 which is the 1GB unit.
the link to CanaKit goes to the 1GB unit NOT the unit reviewed.
if you review model A link to model A and reference model A
 

evilpaul

Distinguished
Nov 21, 2011
21
5
18,515
If you're interested in the Atomic Pi, see if you can get somebody to pay for part of the cost of a Compute Stick, cheap NUC, Latte Panda, etc for you, and buy one of those instead. It'll be just like an Atomic Pi, except functional without soldering crap to it, and there will be faster similar products produced to replace it in the future. And you can buy 30,001 of them if you want, because there's companies manufacturing them rather than pulling them out of talking Roombas that never made it to market.

@op, did you try tinkering with chrome://flags and seeing if you could force hardware video decoding in Chromium? The Youtube channel Explaining Computers's guy seemed to get streaming video to work OK in his review. Also, I'm pretty sure that ~40 FPS in Quake III Arena was what my Voodoo Banshee managed to pull off. Or that might have been the used Voodoo 3 that replaced it. Details are fuzzy, for some reason.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bit_user

g-unit1111

Titan
Moderator
I think this might be the time I actually take the plunge and buy a Raspberry Pi. Does anyone know what kind of OS it can support? Could I try loading my spare Windows 7 license on it? Will Pi 4 support memory cards larger than 32GB?
 
OS support is, AFAIK:

NOOBS - no idea what that is, because I never tried it or read anything about it.
and
Debian Stretch, ported to the Pi...which works quite well, as long as you can ignore all the cutesy icons. o_O
and
Debian Jessie and Jessie-Lite, ported to the Pi. Same caveat about icons for the full-Jessie release.
and
For the Model 4, you'll need to download Debian Buster (still in testing), ported to the Pi....and Buster is backward compatible with all the Pi boards.

#### EDIT ####
I also just ran across this review of the Buster iteration of the OS:
############

There are also several other CLI-only (no-GUI) releases that I've tinkered with, but Jessie-Lite was quite a bit better than what I saw.

I'm sure that there are other OS options available for the ARM Cortex-A53, and people have spoken of windows on the Pi (win10 ARM64 or win10 IoT Core), but I've never been interested enough to bother looking.
 
Last edited:
Oh....the platform will support up to 128GB MicroSD or SD cards (depending on the specific board you have).

You can get some answers to potential questions here.

################

And I just ran across some third-party OS offerings:
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: bit_user

bit_user

Polypheme
Ambassador
The new Pi4 might beat/equal the nVidia nano now in CPU performance, wild.
Yeah, but the point of the Nvidia platforms wasn't really CPU performance.

Plus, their Nano is just a re-purposed Tegra X1, from 4 years ago. I guess they also disabled half of the CUDA cores (probably for power & yield reasons). Anyway, surpassing its CPU performance isn't really saying much...
 

bit_user

Polypheme
Ambassador
If you're interested in the Atomic Pi, see if you can get somebody to pay for part of the cost of a Compute Stick, cheap NUC, Latte Panda, etc for you, and buy one of those instead.
Or an ODROID-H2, which looks to be an excellent implementation of the latest and greatest of Intel's low-power SoCs:

(BTW, they have US distributors - I think you needn't order it direct form SK)
 

bit_user

Polypheme
Ambassador
I think this might be the time I actually take the plunge and buy a Raspberry Pi.
Do it.

Does anyone know what kind of OS it can support? Could I try loading my spare Windows 7 license on it?
About running Windows on it, here's what their FAQ says:

As of summer 2015, a version of Windows 10 is available for use on the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. This is an entirely new version of the operating system designed exclusively for embedded use, dubbed the Windows 10 Internet of Things (IoT) Core. It does not include the user interface (shell) or the desktop operating system.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/faqs/#pi-software
 
  • Like
Reactions: g-unit1111