@oxbird thanks for your reply, I’ve not done anything with it since my initial test. From the quick tests I did speed across USB3.0 between disks/thumb drives was as it should be. I did find that 2 x USB 3.0 2.5" spinning disks pulled too much power and one wouldn’t spin up.
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Wonder how good it is at DS emulation, a DSPi would be a pretty cool project.
Edit: P in brackets is subsection symbol? §
i just ordered one but i decided to include an official enclosure, Wich wont arrive to the store for a few weeks.
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It depends upon the hardware ability to handle the software mode, I’ve seen LUKS fail to mount larger volumes if the system wasn’t “fast” enough-it’ll just go into a password loop. Since the Pi4 is still going through firmware tweaks, it might be the idle modes doing weird stuff–some owners who got launch boards had reported thermal/performance issues(included a news article below).
Most small boards are still limited to the system’s “power management” of the USB ports, even on an nVidia Jetson Nano with a barrel plug power supply you can’t really push two HDDs unless you know the drives “peak” power usage for spin-up. Running 2x SSDs via USB is low enough in power load.
Still watching how the supply of 4GB versions of Pi4s are, seems like most stores are back-ordered until August and the news article I referenced might be a hint of the back-order reason.
Can anyone recommend an online retailer in the USA with the 4gb model in stock?
not pi specific, but why is RAM so hard to come by on SBC in general? Is it because of low production numbers make DDR purchases expensive, are there licensing concerns, or something else?
Most retailers in the US with an online store have the 4GB model on back-order, online stores like Amazon which have sellers like CanaKit haven’t made any listings yet. CanaKit has their own pre-order option if you order directly.
Part of the limitation with SBC design or marketing is the power requirements start to creep up, higher density low-power memory is costly(DDR3L uses less power than DDR4) and there is demand factors of if a board costs too much you’ll have a very limited user base. Early SBC solutions were more expensive than a Raspberry Pi with 512 MB to 4GB RAM, it was either industrial embedded ARM, PowerPC or AMD’s Geode–this was before Intel launched their Atom platform.
For example you can buy the nVidia Jetson AGX if you want an 8-core CPU, GPU with tensor cores, 16 GB RAM and a NVMe SSD slot but you’ll be paying a huge premium. When the AGX launched it was $1299 USD, the price cut to $699 was to boost incentives of Jetson TX1 users to upgrade instead of side-grading to the less than popular TX2 which remained overpriced(remained at $599 even after the AGX launched) and the recent price drop to $399 is still too pricey in comparison to the AGX specs.
It’s a number of things.
First, DDR costs a lot of money. I’d say 4GB probably costs $10-15 from a manufacturer, in bulk. That’s 20% of the cost of the pi right there. Traditionally, they’ve been trying to stick to the $35 price. Clearly, that’s not going to work. with 4GB, since they need to buy a NIC, CPU, GPIO controller, USB controller, license codecs and all the other little components that nickle and dime you. Then they have to add on some manufacturing costs to get it all assembled, after the PCB’s been cut. All that gets up there and they want to have a bit of profit at the end, so that’s why they’ve been so hard to come by.
Additionally, there’s power requirements. LPDDR4 is super efficient, but every time you crank up the requirements, it will draw more power. Traditionally, you had a very strict power requirement of 2.4A with the Pi due to the microusb port. With the Type C port, I’m sure we’ll see a higher power limit, but not by much. maybe 3A. Trying to fit all that stuff into a power budget of 2.4A was difficult, so cutting back on RAM was a great way to help that.
That and not many people really need more than 1GB. I mean, hell, I’ve got a Pi 3 running a Java program, on a full graphical environment in my car (for tuning and whatnot) that works just fine with 1GB. Definitely uses ~650-750MB of ram, but 4GB isn’t needed.
Keeping my eye on this;
For me this is the desired use case for ARM, purpose built images that do a job. Not a Linux box treated like an x86 build.
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Yeah, I can see both sides. ARM is showing promise for low-powered laptops, but we’ll see what happens.
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I would absolutely get an ARM laptop as soon as a decent OEM decides to make them. I’ve seen a few Pinebooks in review and… well… they aren’t very durable. If they can figure out how to give them a better cooling solution and give the cases more rigidity then I might go for it but right now I don’t know if I would get one even for $100.
Pinebook is not Pinebook Pro.
Pinebook Pro is supposed to be much better.
They’re addressing the cooling and rigidity issue.
They’re also going to be addressing the crappy mouse, keyboard and display. I think it’s getting 1080p ips.
We have a pinebook thread, a pine employee was commenting in that thread. Might be worth checking out.
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There are ARM Chromebooks some can have Linux installs, others via chroot/crouton and Linux container is a standard feature with plain Jane ChromeOS via Crostini.