My ARM fleet

[Dirk Broer]

My ARM fleet has grown over the years, but is as yet no Armada. What began with a single Raspberry Pi Model B+ and soon grew with Banana Pro and a BeagleBone Black to no less than four running ARM cores, was in the end of the 32-bit era a cluster-like stack of SBCs consisting of Raspberry Pi's 2, 3 and 4 (two examples of each), so 24 cores running, with the afore mentioned Raspberry Pi Model B+, Banana Pro and BeagleBone Black forming the reserve, together with a Cubieboard 4 that went out with a bang! due to overheating -and I still hope to be able to revive it -I hope it was the card or the PSU that went bang!, I can't find anything on the board. I must have a PSU that's able to deliver 5V-4A somewhere....

Then the Raspberry foundation brought out their 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 Model, together with a 64-bit OS. So I went out and bought one, and I bought a 64-bit Odroid-N2+ as well -after my experiment with a 32-bit Odroid-XU4 went well.

My 32-bit fleet now consists of two Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, two Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and an Odroid-XU4 (still 24 cores running, but a tad faster) with the Cubieboard 4 (8 cores) still in reserve. In the event the Cubieboard 4 is raised from the grave the Raspberry Pi 2's go to the reserve, as I expect the performance of the Cubieboard 4 to be about the same as that of the Odroid-XU4 -slightly less than four times that of a Raspberry Pi 2, two times that of a Raspberry Pi 3.

The 64-bit fleet is in the build-up phase and will consist of three Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and two Odroid-N2+ (one with Android, the other with Linux), also 24 cores running.

[Dirk Broer]

Good news on the 32-bit front: the Cubieboard 4 lives! It is the PSU that died -just as I thought. I was able to flash a new OS to the onboard eMMC by using a USB 3.0 cable between a PC and the Cubieboard. Now to the hunt for a 5V 4A PSU with the right connector -those for e.g. an Odroid-XU4 don't fit, too big, but there might be an adapter. If the Cubie goes up, I'll have 40 32-bit ARM cores up and running! I think I'll try FreeBSD on the two Raspberry PI 2's by that time.

Less good news on the 64-bit front: Though all my three Raspberry Pi 4's now merrily run Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit and my first Odroid-N2+ 64-bit does the same with Android64 9 PIE, my 2nd Odroid-N2+, the one I meant for Linux, gives big troubles. The HDMI port seems to have a problem, as I only get 'digital signal error' out of it. Going in via SSH -thanks to PuTTy- gives a sluggish, underperforming board, not the blistering fast cruncher I had in mind. So, I have 24 64-bit ARM cores running, but I am not happy with six of those.

Edit: I don't know what I did -perhaps even nothing and the system just calibrated itself-, but the speed of the N2+ has improved dramatically. WEP M2 went from 7+ hours per WU to less than 2 -and it is not even running at 2400 MHz yet....

[Dirk Broer]

Actual life always goes in another direction than the carefully laid-out plans you made.

The present active 32-bit fleet of my ARMada consists solely of two Raspberry Pi 3's running the latest version of 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS and one Odroid-XU4 running Ubuntu Mate 20.04, so a mere sixteen cores where I had planned twenty-four.
Two Raspberry Pi 2's, an Odroid-C1, a Banana Pro, a Raspberry Pi B+ and a BeagleBone Black form the 1st line reserve -as I know they will function when powered on.
The 2nd line reserve is formed by two Cubieboard4-CC-A80's and a Banana Pi M2, boards that have me baffled as to why they won't run when I say so -or at least when I power them on and all the blinkenlights are doing their things.

The 64-bit fleet is doing more than well at the moment however. Two Odroid-N2+ boards -one running 64-bit Android 9 PIE-, three Raspberry Pi 4's and two Jetson Nano's perform up to expectations and give me 32 running 64-bit ARM cores. Apart from the occasional 64-bit ARM application, the twenty-six 64-bit cores running Linux mainly run WEP-M+2 in 32-bit alt_platform mode, as our man in Vietnam, DavidBAM, might have noticed.

[NeoGen]

Actual life always goes in another direction than the carefully laid-out plans you made.

Tell me about it... I wanted to upgrade my workstation this year, and we got hit with a global chip shortage that's driving prices crazy and components stock to zero.
How's the ARM side of things doing, is the supply and demand still under control?

[Dirk Broer]

After the successful transformation of the two Raspberry Pi 3's from the 32-bit into the 64-bit part of the fleet there is a new success to be reported: the Admiralty has been able to secure a Radxa Rock Pi 4B+ with 32 GB eMMc for the 64-bit fleet, plus a Xigmatek Porter N881 for the 32-bit fleet -already the third super-cooler since the Admiralty went for that. There is also talk about procuring a Radxa CM3 plus IO board combo in China, along with a big heatsink for the Rock Pi 4B+ (v1.6 with the faster OP1 edition of RK3399).
The only setback that the Armada presently faces is that the two Cubieboard 4's still won't play along nicely with the rest of the fleet. We either get them going on way too weak PSUs which makes them fail as soon as BOINC starts, or they won't even boot when connected to an able PSU.

[Dirk Broer]

The guys at Raspberry.org have released an official 64-bit Bullseye version of their Debian-based OS.

This gave me the chance to upgrade a Raspberry Pi 3 to use a 64-bit OS, but I have yet to see the advantage of it. It looks like the 1GB of relatively slow RAM is a bottleneck.

Update: It looks like Bullseye needs more power than previous versions, as I was getting too low voltage warnings (got them on my original Pi B+ too).
I went for more expensive USB-cables and found 64-bit Bullseye scoring double the Integer and floating point marks:

1434 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
32685 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU

...and not only were the benchmarks doubled, the computation times for WEP-M+2 were halved too -and that's where it counts!

[Dirk Broer]

Even ARM products suffer under the present chip shortages.

My tip for ARM crunching would be a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module I/O board that will allow you to easily add a NVMe SSD as boot medium, far superior to the SD card that comes with the standard model. And when you have it running well you might opt for another I/O board, together with three other CM4's: the Turing 2.

[Dirk Broer]

Yet another day in SBC-City, home of the ARM fleet (a.k.a. ARMada)

The SBC-City housing committee has voiced its concerns at the fleet about temperatures in Raspberry Towers no. 2B. Though the inhabitants of nearby no. 3B are doing quite well after their changeover to a 64-bit OS, the inhabitants of 2B are very much bound to a 32-bit OS due to their ARM Cortex-A7s and, from the low voltage warnings on the screen, it looks like they are really having trouble running both CPU and 30mm fan at 5 Volt. This never was the case when an external duo of 120mm fans still kept the ARM fleet cool. The idea is now to mod the PiHut housings of both 2B and 3B by taking the mid-level out, so room comes available for 52Pi Ice Tower Low profile coolers. The two 2B inhabitants so will use up almost all PiHut space, and at least one of the inhabitants of 3B will therefore be housed in the remnants of old Raspberry Towers -presently in use by the Odroid-C1. The idea is that the predicted lower temperatures will increase performance for all four Raspberries.

At last fleet manoeuvres it was established that the Raspberry Pi 2B performs roughly 10 times as fast as the Fleet's original Raspberry Pi Model B+, and five times as fast as the famous Beaglebone Black under the same underlying Debian version. The 3Bs that originally were almost twice as fast as the 2Bs (and performed at the level of the 1500 MHz Cortex-A5 Odroid-C1) are now trice as fast due to their 64-bit OS and perform even better than the ASUS Tinkerboard with its high-end 32-bit Cortex-A17. With the 52Pi Ice Tower Coolers fitted they might be able to do an overclock to at least 3B+ level, meaning 1400 instead of 1200 Mhz. 1500 might even be reached...

The 1400+ MHz would bring them at the same level, Hertz-wise, as the previous low-end 64-bit crunchers: the Nvidia Jetson Nanos, with their Cortex-A57 Tegra SOCs. Their superior IPC, as compared to the Cortex-A53, makes that they perform twice as fast though -at least on the WEP-M+2 Project. This makes fleet procurement look into the rumoured king-of-performance-per-Watt: the ARM Cortex-A55, meaning the Odroids C4 and M1, the Radxa Rock 3A/3B and the Banana Pi M5. At the present SBC supply shortages not all of these can be bought at any time soon though, and Fleet procurement would actually rather have any model of the Raspberry Pi 4 than a Cortex-A55 board, and when pushed to the choice preferably an Odroid-N2+. The Fleet's experimental branch however, that is soon forced to finally hand over the Raspberry Pi CM4 and the Radxa Rock Pi 4B to the operational part of the Fleet, now wants an Odroid-M1, pointing at the availability, the relatively low price (at least for the 4GB model), the much better M.2 NVMe storage option, the higher DDR4 speed and the included NPU.

[Dirk Broer]

And now for something completely different: Another day in SBC-city, a bit of sillyness.

At 3B, Raspberry Towers an inhabitant seems to be terminally ill. 3B, Raspberry Towers was erected together with 2B, Raspberry Towers when the old Raspberry Estate Building that housed the entire -then- Raspberry family was taken apart to form 4B/4G, Raspberry Lighthouse, next to the smaller 4B/16G Raspberry Lighthouse.

The workload for the ill Raspberry Pi 3B is for the moment lightened by an Odroid-C1 from the reserve, that squated in the presently unused part of the old Raspberry Estate Building. This is frowned upon by the other Odroids, who prefer to live on their own, just like the Jetsons, the Cubieboards (that can all stand on their own feet) and the Bananas (that can't). The Bananas had a bit of a falling out after the retirement of the old Banana Pro, who went to the SBC housing for the elderly, where a BeagleBone Black and a Raspberry Pi B+ gave it a warm (or should we say 'cold' with de-activated SBC's?) welcome.

Banana Pi M2 is on a roll now: it ordered a large DEBO flooring and contacted Noctua for a cooler and fan to be placed on top of it. To really outshine the neighbors, who have to do with 30mm or 40mm fans, it will be equipped with a 60mm fan on a Noctua NC-U6. Suddenly the large flooring makes sense: the Banana M2 might topple otherwise. There are even plans for a Chinese HB-802 cooler with a 80mm Noctua fan it seems!

The Jetsons have ordered new powerlines and are still working on improved cooling for themselves. The Cubieboards also have ordered new powerlines and have experimented with a twice as big as original heatsink (area 25mm squared instead of 12.5mm squared) and a 40mm Noctua fan -that presently sits on the Odroid-C1's cooling solution: the old Odroid-XU4 active cooler, combined with Noctuas finest. The XU4 uses a XU4Q heatsink with a 40mm Noctua fan itself.

Rumours are that 3B, Raspberry Towers will soon house an ASUS Tinker Board S to replace the poor Raspberry Pi 3B. Will the mere 30mm fan there be enough? We'll soon find out.

[Dirk Broer]

Today the Raspberry Pi CM4 was handed to the active fleet by the Fleet's experimental branch, but grudgingly. The experimental department is not happy with the speed -stock @1500 MHz- and the chosen cooling solution, a 140mm Noctua Redux
raspberry-pi-cm4-noctua-fan-overclock-test-setup-image.jpg -a la Jeff Geerling-
blowing over the CPU, but in this case helped by a Xigmatek Porter N881 chipset cooler on top of the CPU. But just not fastened as the experimental department would have had it.
There are plans to mount a Noctua NC-U6 or a PCCooler HB-802, but the experimental department is still looking for a way to securely fasten the cooler to the module/IO board combo. Soon as that happens, 2300 MHz is the very least the Fleet hopes for.

Next launch will be the Rock Pi 4B, in its metal passive cooling case:

The experimental branch is planning an old Pentium Pro cooler as footing, aided by a 40mm Noctua @5V blowing through it. On top they are thinking of a 80mm Noctua @3.3V, to suck hot air out.

All this will mean the end of active service for the old LeMaker Banana Pro, and now the Raspberry Pi 2s and the Banana Pi M2 come in the danger zone. The Raspberries get a chance with Ice Tower coolers to crank up their daily score and their maximum MHz limit, but the Banana Pi M2 already has an even better cooler and has to try to get overclocked to somewhere in the 1200 MHz.