Raspberry Pi is a Low-Power, Credit-Card Sized Computer

[Nflight]

Raspberry has a new model coming out at a Cheaper price with more features:

[Dirk Broer]

Just bought a B+ model,
so I've added a few more letters to 'BOINC on a RaspBerry Pi (or other ARM-based hardware) - under construction -'

[Dirk Broer]

Just bought a B+ model,
so I've added a few more letters to 'BOINC on a RaspBerry Pi (or other ARM-based hardware) - under construction -'

It is complete now! Scroll up (or down, depending on whether you see the newest postings at the top or at the bottom of the thread)
to see the complete table. Now for a monitor to connect to my Raspberry and when it's up and running I'll go test the Banana Pi and Banana Pro as well,
connecting them all to the same USB-hub, Network and KVM switches...

[Dirk Broer]

New models of the Pi keep coming!

After the Model B+, which brought us refinements such as four USB2.0 ports, micro SD Card and micro USB power connector,
came Model A+, which brought us all the functionality -and more- of the original Model A, but then at a lower power usage and a smaller format.

Now there is the Raspberry Pi 2, here together with the Model B+


What's the difference?

• It is faster (900MHz instead of 700 MHz),
• It has twice the RAM (1GB instead of 512MB of the Model B+),
• It has four times the cores (Broadcom BCM2836 ARM Cortex-A7 quad-core processor instead of a Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 single-core processor),
• It is up to six times faster in applications.

MicroSoft has even promised a Windows 10 version that can be used on this Raspberry

I can hardly wait for the AMD ARM SOC on a likewise board, as it is 64-bit....

[Dirk Broer]

It has been a week or so since I got my first SBC (Single Board Computer, it has Mobo, RAM and CPU all on one SOC, System-On a-Chip) on BOINC.
It went all very smooth: load the Noobs that you can download from the Raspberry website on a SD card of at least 8GB (I use 16GB just to be sure), insert the SD card,
apply power, let the system start up, install BOINC

# sudo apt-get install boinc

-and off you go.

As I use BAM!, all projects that I have defaulted there were made active on the Raspi, which included projects without applications for the Raspi. So I had to divide my boxen/hosts into groups. It will come as no surprise to e.g. vaughan that BAM! had some nasty surprises here when more than one box/host was in a group, luckily this did not affect the workings of the Raspi as it is the sole member of my group 'ARM11 on Raspbian'.

What is in that group?

• A Raspberry Pi Model B+, running a Linux 3.18.7+ kernel (Debian Wheezy)
• CPU : A Broadcom ARMv6-compatible processor ARM11, rev 7 (v6l), in short ARM1176JZF-S aka BCM2835 (for the full SOC)
• Features : swp, half, thumb, fastmult, VFP, edsp, java/jazelle, tls

I tried these settings:

Speed in MHz	Floating Point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU	Integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
700	222	926
800	266	1073
950	323	1275
1000	338	1355

At 1000MHz it is more responsive and, due to its nice red Lego casing, not hot at all. IMG_0428.jpg

My Raspi2 is the sole member of my group 'ARM Cortex-A7 on Raspbian'.

What is in the group?

• A Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, running a Linux 3.18.7+ kernel (Debian Jessie)
• CPU : A Broadcom ARMv7A-compatible processor ARM Cortex-A7, rev 5 (v7l), aka BCM2836 (for the full SOC)
• Features : half, thumb, fastmult, VFP, edsp, NEON, VFPv3, tls, VFPv4, idiva, idivt, VFPd32, lpae, evtstrm

For the Raspberry Pi 2 i got these values (before and after armhf update, and later integer update):

Speed in MHz	Floating Point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU	Integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
1000	293	1163
1000	489	1448
1000	489	1944

Though the MIPS values originally were less than the single-core Raspberry Pi B+ @1000 MHz, having four -more modern- cores certainly gives an advantage.
Updating the armhf (hardware floating point) and integer files gave a tremendous boost to the benchmarks, now to see what it offers in real life...
It is not just MHz and MIPS what counts when it comes to real-life performance!

Project	Avg. running time in hours	Avg. credit	Green light?	Orange light?	Red light?
Albert@Home	25	100	Yes	-	-
Asteroids@Home	gets stuck at 7% (Raspi B+) 100 (Raspi 2)	480	Yes	-	-
Collatz@Home	tbd	tbd	Yes	-	-
Einstein@Home	25	63	Yes	-	-
Enigma@Home	5	30	Yes	-	-
FiND@Home	tbd	tbd	Yes	-	-
MilkyWay@Home	tbd	tbd	RasPi 2	Raspi B+	-
QCN (Quake Catcher Network)	tbd	tbd	RasPi B+*	-	RasPi 2**
Radioactive@Home	tbd	tbd	RasPi 2*	-	-
Seti@Home	110	-	RasPi 2	RasPi B+	-
theSkyNet POGS	tbd	tbd	-	-	RasPi 2**
WUProp	3.5 (Raspi B+) 7 (Raspi 2)	7 (Raspi B+) 14 (Raspi 2)	RasPi 2	RasPi B+	-
Yoyo@Home	tbd	28.86 (Raspi B+) 80 (Raspi 2)	Yes	-	-
] Legenda	tbd=To be determined *=Needs a sensor though **=Will only run using Android as OS	- = no data/not applicable	Green light= Works out-of-the-box	Orange light= Needs some fiddling	Red light= Refuses to work

It appears that most 'native' applications have a problem of sorts -or that connecting through BAM! may seem pretty smart, but you'd better do it the 'hard' way,
as Daniel Carrion explains here at Burdeview. Worked for MilkyWay and WUProp, but at first not for Seti@Home. Seti started after a second round of fiddling though.
Most of the out-of-the-box projects can be brought into action by suspending all others, FiND appears to have run out of work for the Raspberry, OProject has been retired according to BOINCStats -they retired a lot of projects recently- and POGS has trouble with downloading an *.png image.

Looking at the table above though it suddenly dawned upon me that the problems are pretty much all with projects that I normally run as GPU-only.
Now the Raspberry has a pretty potent GPU -some 24 GFLOP as compared to other SBCs that mostly have to do with around 1 or 2 GFLOP-, but nobody has yet written a GPU BOINC application for the Raspberry.
So I may just need different profiles for the Raspberry (location in the project page like 'Home' or 'Work' or 'School' instead of 'default') that allow for CPU crunching of these projects!

Soon to be updated yet again...

[Dirk Broer]

New Raspberry Pi family picture from RasPi.TV (clickable for yet even more detail):


Rumour has it that there is a Model 3A+ in the pipeline, as well as a Compute Module 3...

[Nflight]

Lots of new things on the horizon. Is the ARM product anything similar to what we used to call RISC back in the early nineties? I see a revolution coming in tiny computers linked together to make larger formatted systems work better, instead of having big computers to do the same manual work. Or I hope I got that intent out correctly so you can understand.

Thanks for posting Dirk

[Dirk Broer]

ARM started as Acorn RISC Machine

[Dirk Broer]

Another step in low-power computing: My Pi2 is now running on a Waka Waka (bright light in Swahili) Power+ solar cell bought using a coupon that was in a six-pack of 'Wieckse Witte' wheat beer,
so I got a 50% rebate.


It delivers more than enough power (2200 mAh), so I'll buy a black one for the BeagleBone Black and a yellow one for the Banana Pro soon too. They've even promised more colo(u)rs...




Nice detail: for every one that you buy another gets send to people somewhere on the globe desperately needing light and/or power.

[Dirk Broer]

Should you buy a Raspberry Pi 3?

The main advantages of the Pi 3 are the build-in WiFi and Bluetooth and the higher Clock- and RAM speed.
The lesser advantages are the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture and instruction set, that unfortunately aren't being used in the present Raspbian builds, partly because the Pi 3 is presently limited to 1GB of RAM because of the used Video Core IV GPU (why don't they give each CPU core its own GPU?).
Basically you have a 64-bit capable CPU on a 32-bit system with 1 GB of DDR2 RAM, like in the olden Athlon 64 days (even with comparable MHz...)

BOINC-wise the Whetstone and Dhrystone MIPS are roughly the same as with the Pi 2, just slightly higher because of the 1200 MHz of the Pi 3 vs 900 MHz of the Pi 2 (1000 MHz when OC-ed). As the Pi 3 downloaded four Asteroids WUs, taking 85+ hours (!) each, I can't go into further detail yet. I've set Asteroids to 'No New Tasks', so in a day or three I can compare the Enigma scores as compared to my Pi 2s. The sole Enigma WU that managed to slip through was finished in a little over 9 hours, comparable to my augmented Pi 2, the one with the extra Hardware Floating Point and Integer libraries.

2nd Enigma Wu went in 5.36 hours, a Raspberry record with me (previously stood at 6 hours).

EDIT: By now the Pi 3 has all the scores in my top-10 of fastest Enigma WUs, so it is safe to say that on average the Pi 3 is the better Pi for Enigma.

EDIT2: It seems that the Pi3 is somewhat more power-hungry than its older brothers. When you've enabled the internal WiFi -one of the boards USPs- it definitely needs 2.5A, preferably 3A or even 3.5A (A as in Ampere). You might see BOINC benchmark MIPs that have a twice as high value when connecting the Pi 3 to a 3A PSU as compared to a 2A PSU:

• 375 vs 711 BOINC Floating Point MIPS (Whetstone) per core
• 1240 vs 2469 BOINC Integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per core