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

  1. #51
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    Let's say you bought yourself the latest Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM, what can you do with it? And what couldn't be done with earlier Pi's?

    Let me first stress that the 8GB, together with the ARM Cortex-A72 allow for a 64-bit OS -e.g. Raspberry Pi OS to be used to the fullest extent.
    From the Raspberry Pi 3B on (and even the 2nd edition of the Raspberry Pi 2B) the board had a 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53, but with only 1 GB of RAM. The Pi 4B was originally introduced with 1, 2 and 4 GB, the latter just having enough RAM to be able to run a 64-bit OS (and more than enough to run a 32-bit OS). The 1 GB model has been withdrawn since a few months and a 8 GB model has now been added to the line. That is as much RAM as is there in the PC of my missus, and twice the RAM as in the PC of my daughter! (she uses a hand-me-down Socket 775 Dell that won't accept more than 4GB and is due for a Ryzen 5 upgrade, though with that new B550 chipset a Ryzen 3 from the 3000 series might do too...)

    What projects have apps for ARM/Linux? And do they cater 64-bit?
    *Does anyone have an overview for WCG? COVID-19 and MIP can be done 32-bit natively and 64-bit with a hack at least*

    If you have installed a 64-bit OS and want/need to run 32-bit apps, you might need to install 32-bit libraries to do so.
    In case of wanting to run 32-bit apps under a 64-bit OS you get a message like "This project doesn't support computers of type aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu" from that project.
    You then need to add:
    Code:
    <options>
      <alt_platform>arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf</alt_platform>
    </options>
    to the cc_config.xml file
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 08-07-2020 at 11:50 AM.


  2. #52
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    Interesting option to both stack and cool Raspberry Pi's, nVidia Jetson's, ASUS Tinker Boards or Odroid-C1's, -C2's or -C4's:
    GeeekPi's New Raspberry Pi Rack Case Stackable Cluster Case with 120mm RGB LED Cooling Fan 5V

    One can always replace the carnival outfit with a better performing non-RGB fan...
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 09-01-2020 at 01:22 AM.


  3. #53
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    SBC extreme cooling: the quest for more power

    52Pi -sometimes written as S2Pi- are developing themselves as the Noctua of SBC cooling: High-end air coolers with good performance.

    After we had the Ice Tower cooler for the Raspberry Pi that shaves some 30-40°C off the Pi's operating temperature we got a specialized 4-pin Nvidia Jetson Nano cooler featuring a far bigger cooling block and two heat pipes, that even managed to shave some 40-45°C off the Nano's operating temperature!
    As it uses a 4pin fan, just imagine what a 2cm thick Noctua 40mm 5V fan could do..
    Their lastest SBC cooling product is a 2-pin low-profile Pi cooler, looking (at first glance) very much like the Nano cooler, but with a far smaller cooling block and a thinner radiator, that manages to keep the Raspberry Pi's just a tad cooler than the 'big tower' model can -partly due to blowing air down over the board itself too. Gone however is the possibility to add a second fan in push-pull combination.

    What does this have to do with a quest for power? The most capable 32-bit ARM SOCs are eight-cores that all suffer the same problem: overheating and hence down throttling.
    My Odroid-XU4's Samsung Exynos 5422 SOC sometimes runs as slow as 1100/1000 MHz due to down throttling, while it can do 2000MHz/1400Mhz on its Cortex-A15 respectively Cortex-A7 cores. And the same holds, due to less cooling, even more true for the Cortex-A15/A7 equipped Allwinner A80 in my Cubieboard 4's, that is advertised at the same speeds as the Odroid-XU4. It surely holds true for the [standard] totally un-cooled Allwinner A83T Cortex-A7 Octa-Core of the Banana Pi M3, that is supposed to run at 1800 MHz: all three octa-cores will overheat and throttle down. I have yet to hear of an enthusiastic Banana Pi M3 user on that account.

    So we need more cooling, and 52Pi is going to supply it. It is just that they themselves do not know it yet. I will try to tie-wrap my way into getting their low-profile ice-tower cooler securely onto my Odroid-XU4 and my Cubieboard 4, as the normal way of fitting them will not work. I'll keep you informed.

    BTW: There's one SBC that doesn't need tie-wrapping contraptions: The ASUS Tinker Board -size-wise a replica of the Raspberry Pi-. The low-profile Ice Tower Pi cooler ought to fit like a glove...
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 11-22-2020 at 09:51 AM.


  4. #54
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    Can you get better cooling than with the Out-Of-the-Box (OOB) solutions of 52PI? Yes, but it takes some out-of-the-box thinking to make a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) extreme cooler.
    When searching for '52pi Ice Tower' in Google I came across 'Sub-20$ DIY Cooler DESTROYS 52pi Ice Tower', so before you order a 52Pi cooler, first read this.
    The bloke who wrote it had thought of using a cheap Chinese northbridge cooler for PC mainboards when he couldn't find the holy grail of chipset cooling: the discontinued Noctua NC-U6.
    If you happen to have one lying around: grab it and use it, either on a SBC or on a X570 mobo -or sell it.

    The contraption built looks like this:
    Cooling performance was like this:
    I'll keep looking for more extreme solutions...


  5. #55
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    Now that is some serious passive cooling, now we just need a case designed for that shape.

  6. #56
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    As the WEP-M+2 Project has congested, I had to turn my Raspberry Pi's to other projects, and now I want to replace my Raspberry Pi 2's.
    World Community Grid takes forever on them. So, what are the options?

    32 Bit
    32-bit-wise I can replace a Raspberry Pi 2 with an ASUS Tinker Board S or an Odroid-XU4.
    Advantages of the first choice is that I can re-use PSUs and casing and don't need an SD card.
    Disadvantage of the first choice is the price: just short of 100 Euro's for a single Tinker Board S.
    Would I buy an Odroid-XU4 however, then I have to buy a PSU and an SD card and I end up with a total of some 100 Euro's too -and that's just one Pi 2 replaced in both cases.

    64-bit
    64-bit-wise I can replace a Raspberry Pi 2 with a Raspberry Pi 3+, a Raspberry Pi 4, or an Odroid-C4 (vaporware-wise I might also opt for a Banana Pi M5).
    As the 2GB model of the Pi 4 is just as expensive as the 1GB Pi 3+, and half of the price of an Odroid-C4, I feel very much tempted to replace my Pi 2's with 2GB Pi 4's and run 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS on them.
    The Pi 4 has almost -no eMMC- all the advantages of the Tinker Board S and none of the disadvantages, the Odroid-C4 faces the problem of having to buy a new (12V-2A) PSU too.
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 12-29-2020 at 04:07 PM.


  7. #57
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dirk Broer View Post
    So we need more cooling, and 52Pi is going to supply it. It is just that they themselves do not know it yet. I will try to tie-wrap my way into getting their low-profile ice-tower cooler securely onto my Odroid-XU4 and my Cubieboard 4, as the normal way of fitting them will not work. I'll keep you informed.
    Well, some tie-wraps further I decided to buy a Jetson Nano -the 'cheap' 2GB model, as Simply Red already sung "Money's too tight to mention".
    The earlier bought top-down blowing 52Pi coolers went to my two Raspberry Pi 4 model 4GB's, as it proved very hard/impossible to secure them to either the Cubieboard 4 CC-A80, respectively the Odroid-XU4. The complete 64-bit ARM squadron of my ARM fleet runs now on 2000+ MHz Cortex-A7x's (forgetting the in total four Cortex-A53's that are part of the two six-core Odroid-N2+'s).

    For the Nano I have also bought the specialized 52Pi Nano cooler, but the first setback was that the included miniature torc screwdriver was only able to remove the two outer screws of the four screws holding the relatively big 6cm x 4cm x 1.7cm heatsink, so I'll have to do with passive cooling and stock speeds for the time being.
    And while a Cortex-A57 is no Cortex-A72, it certainly is better than the two Cortex-A7 it will replace. It is also better than a Cortex-A53, so the 100+ Euro 4GB model is high on my list too, the Nano cooler will not go to waste.

    Upon starting L4T (Linux For Tegra) you are greeted with a screen that the staunch AMD supporter will make thinking "isn't that the logo of the GPUs from that other brand? F#**ing nVidia?", while the more opportunistic user will think "isn't that the logo of the brand that works out of the box when installing Linux? Will I have CUDA running on ARM soon?"

    I'll keep you informed.
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 03-25-2021 at 09:46 PM.


  8. #58
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    First start gave a bit of a surprise: I couldn't install either BOINC or Synaptic, but after
    Code:
    sudo apt update --fix-missing
    
    sudo apt dist-upgrade
    I could install to my heart's desire.
    Clinfo at first gave 'no platform', but after installing -amongst others- some nVidia and CUDA files I've progressed to two recognized platforms, GPU and CPU.

    After adding to the cc_config.xml these lines:
    Code:
    <options>
       <alt_platform>arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf</alt_platform>
       <alt_platform>armv7l-unknown-linux-gnueabihf</alt_platform>
    </options>
    and
    Code:
    sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf
    sudo apt update --fix-missing
    sudo apt dist-upgrade
    sudo apt install libc6:armhf libstdc++6:armhf zlib1g:armhf libfuse2:armhf
    to be sure 32-bit libs are there when needed and, voilá: Boinc starts getting work for 32-bit apps.

    Because I was unhappy with the memory assigned to the GPU (a mere 99MB) when using the default 5GB swapdisk I installed and configured ZRAM via
    Code:
    sudo apt install zram-config
    and rebooted

    Jetson-Nano2GB
    Starting BOINC client version 7.9.3 for aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu *so no need to have this as alternate platform*
    log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task
    Libraries: libcurl/7.58.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1 zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.0.4 libpsl/0.19.1 (+libidn2/2.0.4) nghttp2/1.30.0 librtmp/2.3
    Data directory: /var/lib/boinc-client
    CUDA: NVIDIA GPU 0: NVIDIA Tegra X1 (driver version unknown, CUDA version 10.2, compute capability 5.3, 1979MB, 1343MB available, 236 GFLOPS peak) *CUDA! and enough RAM!*
    OpenCL CPU: pthread-cortex-a57 (OpenCL driver vendor: The pocl project, driver version 1.1, device version OpenCL 1.2 pocl HSTR: pthread-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu-GENERIC)
    [libc detection] gathered: 2.27, Ubuntu GLIBC 2.27-3ubuntu1.4
    Host name: Jetson-Nano2GB
    Processor: 4 ARM ARMv8 Processor rev 1 (v8l) [Impl 0x41 Arch 8 Variant 0x1 Part 0xd07 Rev 1]
    Processor features: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32
    OS: Linux Ubuntu: Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS [4.9.201-tegra|libc 2.27 (Ubuntu GLIBC 2.27-3ubuntu1.4)]
    Memory: 1.93 GB physical, 4.97 GB virtual *ZRAM can deliver enough GB's here too
    Disk: 58.41 GB total, 12.05 GB free *This from a 64GB SD card

    We get the following Benchmark results:
    Number of CPUs: 4
    1387 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
    68511 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
    Stock speeds, passive cooling -which gets really hot, BTW...I happened to have an old PIII heatsink of 13 x 8 x 5 cm that I've laid on the Nano for the time being.
    P.S.: Good thing I did, it lowered the temperature with some 20°C...
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 04-21-2021 at 10:39 PM.


  9. #59
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dirk Broer View Post
    Upon starting L4T (Linux For Tegra) you are greeted with a screen that the staunch AMD supporter will make thinking "isn't that the logo of the GPUs from that other brand? F#**ing nVidia?", while the more opportunistic user will think "isn't that the logo of the brand that works out of the box when installing Linux? Will I have CUDA running on ARM soon?"
    I would think "devil be gone from my machine!" *sprays it with holy water*

  10. #60
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    Now, if it were an AMD machine...(but even there, my GTX 1650 performs wonders Radeon can't reach), but is a mere 64-bit ARM system.
    I would welcome any decent performing GPU on that platform, and the NVIDIA Tegra X1 is more than 10 times better that the GPU in a Raspberry Pi -at the moment.

    I do hope that AMD will sell off their surplus Opteron A1100's -that are also ARM Cortex-A57's, just like the nVidia Tegra in the Jetson Nano-, coupled to a Vega 3 GPU, in nice affordable mini iTX boards in the near future.
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 03-29-2021 at 10:01 AM.


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