New Pi Coming (Not Soon, Not 5)
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@superfromnd said in New Pi Coming (Not Soon, Not 5):
I can barely even think of a use case for >4GB of RAM on something like the Pi, so having more than 8 would be hilarious.
And afaik there is indeed no use case where you would want a 8GB pi4 since any software that would require that much ram would still probably run like crap on a 8GB pi4. Sadly, i just think the pi fundation decided to take advantage of the common misunderstanding that "more ram means faster apps" to make more monetary profit.
Before releasing new models, did they even finish fixing gpu driver issues with current model....?
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@brunnis said in New Pi Coming (Not Soon, Not 5):
When Upton is saying that "no one is currently working on the Pi 5 for the time being", it might just as well mean that it's already done or that the people working on it are on vacation. 😅
Not the first time Upton 'trolled' the reporters - in a Feb 2019 interview mentioned the Pi4 will not come until 2020. The Pi4 was released in June 2019 - though other considerents may have rushed the early release, hence the 'troll'.
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Right now (as the owner of a couple of Pi4Bs) I'm more interested in how quickly they will get Mesa > 21.3 into the OS so that RetroPie can use it :D
(Or, while we're imagining what secret plans could be afoot, maybe RetroPie will install a local Mesa to take advantage of recent improvements https://blogs.igalia.com/itoral/ ?)
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@busywait said in New Pi Coming (Not Soon, Not 5):
Right now (as the owner of a couple of Pi4Bs) I'm more interested in how quickly they will get Mesa > 21.3 into the OS so that RetroPie can use it :D
It will probably be included with the new Raspberry Pi OS release, based on the upcoming Debian 11 (Bullseye).
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I think it'll be interesting to see what their focus is going to be for the future versions.
The more powerful it gets the more they might sell it to a broader not purely tech enthusiast public. I feel they dipped their feet in with the Rpi400 and that seemed pretty popular.But the thing is the OS and software is not really good enough for mainstream use. Youtube is running pretty badly. Bluetooth and other networking is a hassle and unreliable. The screen refresh tearing is still not fixed. They sold h265/hevc hw decode ability but I don't think its working out of kodi? etc
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@brunnis said in New Pi Coming (Not Soon, Not 5):
When Upton is saying that "no one is currently working on the Pi 5 for the time being", it might just as well mean that it's already done or that the people working on it are on vacation. 😅
Or the interview happened on a sunday, or at night. 😉
@George-Spiggott Thanks for the news. I'm curious about every new Pi model, but I'm in no real hurry. I just got a Pi 400 to tinker with. 😁 For starters, it's doing a test run of the private Minecraft server that a friend and I have since October 2011. It would be nice to finally migrate the server from my everyday desktop mini PC with Kubuntu Linux to an even lower powered machine.
Oh man … I love these times of powerful but affordable miniature computers. 😆
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@mitu said in New Pi Coming (Not Soon, Not 5):
@busywait said in New Pi Coming (Not Soon, Not 5):
Right now (as the owner of a couple of Pi4Bs) I'm more interested in how quickly they will get Mesa > 21.3 into the OS so that RetroPie can use it :D
It will probably be included with the new Raspberry Pi OS release, based on the upcoming Debian 11 (Bullseye).That would be great. The base Debian Bullseye (currently frozen, for official "release" August 14?) currently has Mesa 20.3 - which gives the initial Vulkan 1.0 API, but not some of the additional performance improvements for Vulkan and OpenGL ES that have made it into later Mesa releases. I guess the Rapsberry Pi repos could ofer a more recent version.
I know that there will always be something better around the corner, but this area of the stack seems pretty active at the moment. Exciting :)
https://blogs.igalia.com/itoral/2021/03/16/improving-performance-of-the-v3d-compiler-for-opengl-and-vulkan/
https://blogs.igalia.com/apinheiro/2021/03/improving-v3dv-pipeline-caching/Vulkan 1.1 support for the Pi4 one day?
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@redmarsbluemoon said in New Pi Coming (Not Soon, Not 5):
But the thing is the OS and software is not really good enough for mainstream use. Youtube is running pretty badly. Bluetooth and other networking is a hassle and unreliable. The screen refresh tearing is still not fixed. They sold h265/hevc hw decode ability but I don't think its working out of kodi? etc
Yeah, it's a bit unfortunate that it has taken this long and they still aren't done with these things. Of course, it's not like the Pi 4 has been unusable in the meantime, but some pretty serious stuff like the screen tearing fix (which comes with the full KMS driver) still don't have stable releases, as you point out. As a hardware and software developer myself, I do sympathize with them though. Developing custom hardware, including silicon, and all drivers is a huge effort. On top of that, they have the 64-bit OS project that's been going on for a few years. It's not time critical, but it needs to be done and probably swallows a decent amount of resources.
I do have high hopes for a much better start for the Pi 5, though. It wouldn't make much sense for them to put all this work into the software, especially GPU drivers, just to start from a blank page when the new hardware arrives. The Pi 5 will probably get a very similar GPU design, which would enable it to take advantage of most of the development that has taken place over the last few years.
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@brunnis
Well yes I'll remain a fan and have been enjoying tinkering with my Pi4's. Emu gaming, improving my programming, learning more Linux and contributing to a foss project. Exploring doing SLAM in software and with shaders on the GPU. There's plenty to do for the enthusiast.
But I'm confounded by decisions like doing the Vulkan drivers at all when so much else needs attention for 'non sys admin' users. I love that they are doing that but as a strategic decision, it seems funny. Like you say the Pi5 must get a similar GPU or all that long dev time will be wasted. -
@redmarsbluemoon said in New Pi Coming (Not Soon, Not 5):
But I'm confounded by decisions like doing the Vulkan drivers at all when so much else needs attention for 'non sys admin' users.
you have to bear in mind the aim of the foundation, which is educational, so an open graphics stack is key to that, but in any case they outsourced the work to a third party (igalia).
the tearing issue is fixed in the forthcoming kms driver, which you can already use. i don't know what will bring it out of 'beta' but i fancy it is just waiting for the bullseye release.
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It is nice that the pi 5 is out of the “rumor” stage and now is officially known to be in development. I wonder if they will pull the 64bit is out of beta when it is released.
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