Raspberry Pi 4

Did anybody not see this?
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/

It's made a bit of a splash today. I think it will make a pretty neat Squeak machine, especially for any sort of MC server setup etc. I'm anticipating about a doubling of performance over the 3B+ which would make for quite nice benchmarks. Dual 4K display capability should come in handy too.

Now to find someone to fund the work to do the 64bit ARM Cog..

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: IBLU: Ignore Basic Laws of Universe

> https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/

I see there is a touchcreen monitor available. Can this be used with
Squeak? Can we handle touch gesture events?

Stef

> On 2019-06-25, at 2:08 AM, Stéphane Rollandin <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/
>
> I see there is a touchcreen monitor available.

Yes, a 7" diagonal multi-touch capable unit. It's quite nice but one would want to set larger fonts for most eyes.

> Can this be used with Squeak?

Yes, Squeak runs nicely on a Pi with one of these attached, but...


> Can we handle touch gesture events?

Not terribly well. A nice project for someone!

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
dilate - live long

On 25/06/19 7:36 AM, tim Rowledge wrote:
> Did anybody not see this?
> https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/
>
> It's made a bit of a splash today. I think it will make a pretty neat
> Squeak machine, especially for any sort of MC server setup etc. I'm
> anticipating about a doubling of performance over the 3B+ which would
> make for quite nice benchmarks. Dual 4K display capability should
> come in handy too.

I must confess I am more than a little disappointed with this RPi 4. It
is now promoted as "your tiny, dual display, desktop computer" (!).  If
it is a "desktop computer" where are the SATA [1] or PCIe/M.2 [2]
interfaces? Instead, you get to drive 2 4K monitors. Why would one use
such a board for a server or embed it in a moving robot?

The foundation has strayed away from its original intent to design and
build affordable development boards to promote hands on computing
amongst students [1]. Its main appeal was its openness (global access),
low-cost (i.e. every student could have one or more) and low-power
(battery powered) and wireless connectivity (wifi/BT). With RPi 4, the
power hogs in GPU and Ethernet have become worse.

I find the emergence of boards with Micro Python or Lua out of the box
is more inline with the original RPi mission. The gap between Arduinos
and the old RPis are being filled in by these boards.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=143938
[2] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=230240
[3] https://youtu.be/6xFzVuxldqs (Eben Upton TEDx talk, 2012)

Regards .. Subbu

For zero cost and inmediate use of Smalltalk on the pi,

 64bits and with easy/transparent integration with any native library

 we are using S8 Smalltalk runnning on top of node.js or Lua VMs

 (the same S8 kernel run on top of both VMs).

Using the U8 tools (browsers, references, workspaces, action lists) (*)

 remotelly the system can be developed from any desktop computer

 or android device, exchanging objects and smalltalk code...(**)

as we do on any place where S8 smalltalk is running.

More on using S8 in the PI can be found at

    http://alereimondo.no-ip.org/U8

See platforms pi8 (S8 on top of node.js) and m8n (S8 on Lua).

In case of interest about using Smalltalk on multiple platforms

(or about social software development with Smalltalk)

 join us https://www.facebook.com/groups/s8smalltalk

cheers,

Ale

(*) through framework for fast exchange of objects to/from VSE, Squeak and

 or any other smalltalk system capable to do sockets

(**) see the U8 swiki at "UI8 tools"

On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 03:06, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:

[...]

Now to find someone to fund the work to do the 64bit ARM Cog..

How many zeros are we talking after the leading digit?  Are we talking thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: IBLU: Ignore Basic Laws of Universe

Ah, UK and US politics?

- Peter

The ARM32 Cog took some initial time from Lars to make an Alien Debugger plugin, then something like 4 months of my time and probably a couple of months of Eliot.

For ARM64 we need to essentially do the same for an Alien Debugger plugin, but built from the gcc simulator sources for ... ARM64 instead (duh). Quite a lot of the work we did previously would help, even if it didn't directly carry across.

So yeah, a billion would cover it nicely but 40k might be enough.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- If what you don't know can't hurt you, she's practically invulnerable.

> On 2019-06-26, at 2:05 AM, K K Subbu <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I must confess I am more than a little disappointed with this RPi 4. It is now promoted as "your tiny, dual display, desktop computer" (!).  If it is a "desktop computer" where are the SATA [1] or PCIe/M.2 [2] interfaces?

Connected to the USB-3 ports. Which works really well. Hell, mine work just fine connected to the USB-2 ports on my Pi3 - with USB-3 it will work even better. And there's that 'tiny' part - there simply isn't room for everything. I mean, they had to leave off the pink sparkle-pony this time.

> Instead, you get to drive 2 4K monitors. Why would one use such a board for a server or embed it in a moving robot?

You get two 4k display capability because that is what the videocore design provides. Can you imagine the whining if they had only connected up one port and the news of there being support for two had got out?

>
> The foundation has strayed away from its original intent to design and build affordable development boards to promote hands on computing amongst students [1].

No they haven't. It costs the same. It weighs the same (plus/minus) and is the same size. It uses perhaps 1w more for around twice the performance per core. It has much faster i/o. What's not to like? And it's worth pointing out that the foundation is not the maker - Raspberry Pi Trading is.

> Its main appeal was its openness (global access), low-cost (i.e. every student could have one or more) and low-power (battery powered) and wireless connectivity (wifi/BT). With RPi 4, the power hogs in GPU and Ethernet have become worse.

Not so. And if you want the lower power use and can accept the lower performance, use a Pi Zero.

>
> I find the emergence of boards with Micro Python or Lua out of the box is more inline with the original RPi mission. The gap between Arduinos and the old RPis are being filled in by these boards.

There are good uses for all of these options. Microcontrollers such as Arduino are useful for tiny stuff. Bigger devices like the ESP8266/32 move up the performance  curve and provide wifi - often cheaper than the Arduino boards. Pi are real computers; remember even a Pi Zero is a gigahertz 32bit cpu with hardware array floating point that would have crushed a high end workstation not so very long ago. The Pi4 is benchmarking well into base x86 desktop machine, i5 etc. And it's always good to remember that an x86 is a waste of perfectly good sand.

Be happy to have so many options, so cheap, so flexible, so powerful, so available.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Close your eyes and press escape three times.

On 28/06/19 6:43 AM, Chris Muller wrote:
That is a typical power draw. I was referring to the upwards creep in
the power adapter -  5V/1A to 5V/2A to 5V/3A now.

But my disappointment is not about specs. It is about the divergence
from the motivations that led to RPi - an open physical computing kit
less than the price of a CS textbook. This was also reiterated in
opening para of RPi Zero announcement [1] in 2015. RPi is not a
"batteries included" kit. A complete study kit would be $50+ and it
would increase now.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/

Cortex boards are unarguably more power efficient than x86 boards and I
do like many of the design choices in RPi. But when it comes to laptop
computing needs, Cortex is yet to seriously challenge single thread
performance of x86/x64 boards. In positioning itself towards desktop
computing space, RPi 4 is falling between two stools.

Of course, RPi is free to choose to change their direction. I just
expressed my disappointment about losing a excellent player in the
student kit space.

Regards .. Subbu

On 28/06/19 7:29 AM, tim Rowledge wrote:
>> I find the emergence of boards with Micro Python or Lua out of the box is more inline with the original RPi mission. The gap between Arduinos and the old RPis are being filled in by these boards.
>
> There are good uses for all of these options. Microcontrollers such as Arduino are useful for tiny stuff. Bigger devices like the ESP8266/32 move up the performance  curve and provide wifi - often cheaper than the Arduino boards. Pi are real computers; remember even a Pi Zero is a gigahertz 32bit cpu with hardware array floating point that would have crushed a high end workstation not so very long ago. The Pi4 is benchmarking well into base x86 desktop machine, i5 etc. And it's always good to remember that an x86 is a waste of perfectly good sand.
>
> Be happy to have so many options, so cheap, so flexible, so powerful, so available.
Tim,

My disappointment is not about the specs but their positioning.
Every release prior to RPi 4 was bang on target with respect to their
mission of broadening access to computing kits to students. This was
evident in the sharp adoption curve globally. RPi 4 seems to move away
from that mission - moving towards the top of the demand pyramid rather
than bottom.

Also, x86 boards are two-in-ones - heater and computer - well suited for
colder climes ;-).

Regards .. Subbu