Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?

quicksilver

Anyone else see that raspbian is now going to be called raspberry pi OS?

barbudreadmon

With their team barking at users on their forum when someone asks for 64-bits OS support (for those who don't know : 64-bits is required for an application to handle more than 3GB), i really think raspberrys are turning into a really sad joke at this point...

mitu

@quicksilver said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

Anyone else see that raspbian is now going to be called raspberry pi OS?

Yes - that's quite the change, though I don't see the name change applied in the update. /etc/os-release reports Raspbian still.

George Spiggott

I guess that this is their response to two new competitors to the Pi 4 arriving in the last few of weeks. I am surprised that they've chosen to reintroduce the three different models when they had effectively reduced the line to two and that they have maintained the price points.

quicksilver

@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

With their team barking at users on their forum when someone asks for 64-bits OS support (for those who don't know : 64-bits is required for an application to handle more than 3GB), i really think raspberrys are turning into a really sad joke at this point...

You are definitely a glass half empty kind of guy aren't you? ;)

8gb of ram would help when running multiple tasks though right? The 3gb limitation is only per process right?

grant2258

@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

With their team barking at users on their forum when someone asks for 64-bits OS support (for those who don't know : 64-bits is required for an application to handle more than 3GB), i really think raspberrys are turning into a really sad joke at this point...

@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

With their team barking at users on their forum when someone asks for 64-bits OS support (for those who don't know : 64-bits is required for an application to handle more than 3GB), i really think raspberrys are turning into a really sad joke at this point...

Linux can handle more than 3gb limit in 32 bits with pae (as can windows) just in case you didnt know

George Spiggott

Link to the announcement on their website.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/8gb-raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-at-75/

grant2258

@George-Spiggott said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

Link to the announcement on their website.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/8gb-raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-at-75/

It cant be a bad thing having more memory available again depends what you are using the pi for at the end of the day. In poorer country's will mean kids can do more with it as a desktop.

George Spiggott

There may be some benefits to running Retropie over a 64 bit OS. Dolphin, Citra and WinCE Dreamcast all require a 64 bit OS. Assuming any of these will run at anything approaching playable speed on a PI4 is another matter entirely.

quicksilver

@George-Spiggott in the comments section of that post did you see Eben said some vulkan news was coming soon? Pretty exciting!

barbudreadmon

@quicksilver said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

The 3gb limitation is only per process right?

Yes, more like per-app than per process afaik, which makes this pretty useless, in the first place the only use cases i can see for having 8GB are those :

servers, which will always benefit from allocating more RAM to web server or whatever
desktop, the browser i'm using to write those lines is currently using 4.5GB of RAM...

4GB+ computers should have 64 bits OS, period. Seeing their team arguing that it would be useless, sometimes in a pretty harsh way, even after releasing pi4 4GB, is disappointing, and they are already talking about pi4 16GB.

Also, might be worth mentioning that there are emulators known for working faster on 64-bits, flycast is one (actually it's also required for wince iirc), yabasanshiro is another. Actually i heard even FBNeo is running faster on aarch64 vs arm with the same device

George Spiggott

@quicksilver said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

@George-Spiggott in the comments section of that post did you see Eben said some vulkan news was coming soon? Pretty exciting!

I do now, thanks. Good news for PPSSPP and Flycast. I also heard that Beetle PSX's dynarec runs better on a 64 bit OS but I don't possess a device capable of testing this at the moment.

I also found this "For example, the 64-bit OS now uses KMS (Kernel Mode Switching) for display management, which Upton says could result in problems during beta, but will ultimately lead to a more efficient OS." Here: https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/amp/news/raspberry-pi-4-8gb-tested

Retro

The 8GB model will only really benefit users who use the Pi as a desktop PC and users wanting to run more resource-intensive programs. There is little benefit to using an 8GB model over a 2/4 GB model for emulation. CPU and GPU upgrades are what you want to watch out for when it comes to better emulation.

davej

@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

4GB+ computers should have 64 bits OS, period. Seeing their team arguing that it would be useless, sometimes in a pretty harsh way, even after releasing pi4 4GB, is disappointing, and they are already talking about pi4 16GB.

Also, might be worth mentioning that there are emulators known for working faster on 64-bits, flycast is one (actually it's also required for wince iirc), yabasanshiro is another. Actually i heard even FBNeo is running faster on aarch64 vs arm with the same device

It seems you're so determined to have a moan about the lack of a 64 bit OS that you've missed that their announcement of the 8GB Pi4 also mentions that the beta release of a 64 bit version of their OS is already available.

construkt

@George-Spiggott what are these new competitors?

retropieuser555

So this new 64bit OS, apparently the beta is available for pi3s as well as pi4s, but would that really lead to any benefit for the pi3 in terms of Retropie? Or really the only emulators that benefit would require the better CPU/GPU of the pi4 to see any improvements?

George Spiggott

@construkt said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

@George-Spiggott what are these new competitors?

The Odroid C4 which has similar capabilities and price and the Asus Tinker Edge R. Having since seen that the price for the Asus is over $200 maybe just the Odroid.

Does anyone think there is any benefit to running Retropie on top of this new 64 bit beta OS? Is it even possible?

barbudreadmon

@davej said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

It seems you're so determined to have a moan about the lack of a 64 bit OS that you've missed that their announcement of the 8GB Pi4 also mentions that the beta release of a 64 bit version of their OS is already available.

Should i applaud ? You understand that raspberrys have been 64-bits for 5 years and that official 64-bits support has been a regular request since then ? Go read posts like https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=208314&start=25#p1289026 , where the mod is arguing that yeah, 64-bits is actually faster (after denying it for years), but people should buy i7 or i9 if they want faster computers... The whole 64-bits situation on raspberry has been a sad joke for 5 years... if it had been taken seriously by their team, that support would be perfect now, instead of a measly beta

grant2258

@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

@davej said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

It seems you're so determined to have a moan about the lack of a 64 bit OS that you've missed that their announcement of the 8GB Pi4 also mentions that the beta release of a 64 bit version of their OS is already available.

Should i applaud ? You understand that raspberrys have been 64-bits for 5 years and that official 64-bits support has been a regular request since then ? Go read posts like https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=208314&start=25#p1289026 , where the mod is arguing that yeah, 64-bits is actually faster (after denying it for years), but people should buy i7 or i9 if they want faster computers... The whole 64-bits situation on raspberry has been a sad joke for 5 years... if it had been taken seriously by their team, that support would be perfect now, instead of a measly beta

just wait ill you see all the older emulators 64 bit errors showing up needing fixed this includes retroarch ones. There are reasons beyond your need for a little speed updates for staying 32 bits.

Your entitled to your views but with 64 another set of problems will arise with older emulators. A lot of them have been fixed on mame2003 plus im sure there are many more the only reason they showed up is because i do my testing on a 64bit machine. Anyway polarizing and argument to one point instead of a conversation considering all effects on a project isint a real reflection of reality just one point of view. I think it good people have the option but considering I would be using older cores on a pi anyway ill be sticking too 32bit for it until the ole cores 64 bit updates have been done and matured fwiw.

davej

@barbudreadmon said in Emulation benfit to new 8GB Pi4?:

Should i applaud ?

Only if you feel an urge to.

You understand that raspberrys have been 64-bits for 5 years and that official 64-bits support has been a regular request since then ?

I understand that Pi's have been 64-bit for 4 and a bit years. I also understand that for general purpose computing you're probably better off not using up your 1GB of memory (minus the bit reserved or the GPU) on 64 bit pointers. Obviously if you have a particularly compute intensive task or are trying to access very large databases through the single USB2 port, you might find a 64-bit OS useful - but there were 64-bit OSs available for that. For the Raspberry Pi Foundation's intended use case, i.e. beginners to computing, 64-bit didn't provide enough of a benefit to offset the downsides.

Even with a Pi4 and 4GB (only 1 year old), it still may not be worth it for the Foundation's intended use case. After the GPU, the OS and other services/apps that are running have taken their chunks, there's not going to be that much left above the 32-bit/3GB per process (not application) limit for you to gain from once you take the effects of 64-bit pointers into account.

For 8GB moving to 64-bit definitely makes sense though.