There's a line in the Jurassic Park book where a character is made suspicious by an offhand assertion (by Nedry) that he is using a multi XMP system.
Rpi4s are nice, in a sense, because you can only rarely honestly claim that the speed of the system is holding you back. Most times, presumably, it's the efficiency of the operations you are telling it to execute.
> Rpi4s are nice, in a sense, because you can only rarely honestly claim that the speed of the system is holding you back.
As someone who uses them for a variety of purposes, I gotta note that they have pretty huge limitations. Like, the moment graphics enter the picture (no pun intended) you’re moving an order of magnitude slower than most desktops or laptops. Not to mention that support for hardware video encode/decode (which, especially decode, we generally take for granted) aren’t always available depending on the library or tool you’re working with.
Like yes, you can totally run a serviceable web server on a Pi and serve a blog or a small web app, but let’s not get carried away here.
Requiring a small nuclear reactor to power it aside, the Pi 5 feels far more like it's up to the task of a full desktop machine. Admittedly I haven't tried anything but headless workloads on mine so far, but it's so much snappier it's genuinely unreal. I'm really looking forward to seeing how much faster lidar localization and just SLAM in general runs on it once ROS support is sorted.
Although they did remove the h264 decoder and encoder which is a bummer, like you say it's hard to get working support for it anyway. Vulkan + regular GPU acceleration might be easier. And it still only has 4 cores which is crap for desktop multitasking.
The lack of I/O to the cpu might be the counterpoint to this. A single (exposed) PCIe lane might be enough for any singular task, but you're likely to start bogging down your bandwidth if you need to do any serious simultaneous tasks like network above a gbit, nvme disk IO, additional display or additional parallel computing like a GPU.
it’s easy to forget how many bits needs to be pushed down a graphics pipeline, per pixel, per frame. in fact forget the pipeline, just pushing the bits down the wire fast enough is a non-trivial task.
I agree. I was a bit too flip in my original comment; there are regular tasks now that simply require multiples of the data throughput that the 1980s Cray machines were capable of.
The simpler point I was aiming at was just that: the amount of computational power at the fingertips of so many of us is huge, and it's important to appreciate that.
Rpi4s are nice, in a sense, because you can only rarely honestly claim that the speed of the system is holding you back. Most times, presumably, it's the efficiency of the operations you are telling it to execute.