dual chip pi

[hawke0777]

is there any way to get someone to make a pi with dual chips, think that would be cool and it would also get rid of some of the lag time, of course it would double the size of the pi, because you would have to double the ram, but the pi would almost be just as fast as any pc, in theory, if you did this...

[fruitoftheloom]

is there any way to get someone to make a pi with dual chips, think that would be cool and it would also get rid of some of the lag time, of course it would double the size of the pi, because you would have to double the ram, but the pi would almost be just as fast as any pc, in theory, if you did this...

[Mod cleaned of unpleasant tone]

https://www.arm.com/products/processors ... essing.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE

http://mediatek-helio.com/x10/

[hawke0777]

i understand that you can up the cores on it, but why is that such an insult 1.2 is laggy and you can only run one function

[hawke0777]

p.s. 1.8 ghz is the fastest cortex out there now why was it a fools question to ask why not double the processor and ram (cant forget that at the expense of sounding like a noob.) and get the same processing speed as todays pc's the chip is small enough, add a heat sink if we are talking about heat issues.......i think i read an article that said that the more you "stack" or add a core you run into heat issues and also its difficult to make the chip stable......but then perhaps your right in another generation or two someone will figure out how to make the cortex into a 12 core processor and still maintain its size i surely cant wait for that one.

[kusti8]

Because it would cost too much and it would make no sense. If you want something as fast as your PC, then built a PC or get a nuc or something more powerful. The pi isn't meant to be as powerful as a desktop. That's why it costs $35.

You can't just throw some ram and more cpus at the Pi. You can't just raise the frequency without bounds. You're limited by the design, by the CPU support, by thermals, and by the specs of the chip.

And anyway only things heavily optimized for multi threads could take advantage of it.

You can't do it, the Foundation doesn't take requests and it is very very unlikely it would ever happen.

[jahboater]

i understand that you can up the cores on it, but why is that such an insult 1.2 is laggy and you can only run one function

What do you mean "you can only run one function" ?
You did realize that the Pi2 and Pi3 have four CPU cores each ?

[jamesh]

is there any way to get someone to make a pi with dual chips, think that would be cool and it would also get rid of some of the lag time, of course it would double the size of the pi, because you would have to double the ram, but the pi would almost be just as fast as any pc, in theory, if you did this...

I'd suggest getting a book or finding a website that can teach you about CPU architecture and multi core vs multi-chip solutions to computer performance. Multi chip is not used so much now due to the difficulty in sharing memory, and now we have multi core chips it's really only of use in super computers.

But first note that the Pi is a quad CORE processor with shared memory. The ArmV8 cores used, when used with the Linux OS, are capable of multithreading, which means you can have many many processes running at the same time via timesharing, but 4 running AT THE SAME TIME on the 4 cores.

On you Pi, type `ps ax` which gives a list of all the processes running on the Pi at any one time, this actually ignores the total number of threads running which will be even greater.

In the 80's, there was a machine called the Cray-1. The fastest supercomputer in the world. The Pi is 40 times faster than that....and Crays were used to solved some pretty impressive problems....

[Gavinmc42]

If you think 4 x Arm 64bit cores, 2 x VPU's, 12 x QPU's and the Arm in the WiFi chip is not enough cores the perhaps the Nvidia chips are more down your street.

Something like this, with 256 Cuda cores, Quad 64bit ARM's+
http://www.nvidia.com/object/embedded-s ... dules.html

We can still improve the Pi software, it currently runs 32bit code.
The Pi2/3 could/should run 64bit code and do stuff a bit/a lot faster.

I just got a Cluster hat, a Pi 3 with 4 Pi Zero's that gets you 8 x Arm, 10 x VPU , 60 x QPU cores.
Software will be a bit tricky
A QPU is a Quad processing unit ie 4 x ALU.
So a Cluster hat has 258 ALU's not including the WiFi cpu's and the NEON/SIMD stuff which are like co-processors.
Not actually sure how to get the max out of this setup, this is the first time I calculated the numbers
Might have to read a book on clustering, more learning

Maybe the next Pi4 chip will be octo core? but that is still some time off.

The Pi was never designed to replace the Desktop, it was for learning coding and hacking hardware.
The fact that the Pi3 can now be used as a simple desktop is amazing not disappointing.
The software is still early days for 64bit multicore cpu usage, most users don't know or care about cores.

The fact that a $35 PC does not match the performance of a $3500 Games box is NOT and should not be something to complain about or even wish for. Wait until Pi 7 or 8 before complaining

[YCN-]

Hi there,

Just wanted to show you this :

it's a rpi cluster made by some research guys, look at the awesomeness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C44quUX-AoE

Btw you guys are violent with the poor author of the post ahah. I don't think he intended to be rude with the Pi Fundation, he just had a question, that you may sound stupid, but it was just out of curiosity I think.

I'm not really used to read such comments on this forums, raspberry pi org is all about loving and sharing computer and hardware enthusiast so please let them in this great community and don't frighten them away with your nasty comments.

PS: Read this with an ironical tone.

[jamesh]

Thread cleaned of unnecessarily harsh tone.

[fruitoftheloom]

Thread cleaned of unnecessarily harsh tone.

Spoilsport.
If was just FotL being normal for a thread created by someone who, probably, needs to do a little bit more research before posting on here.

I love the garden shed hardware designers who think that Eben and your team aren't already stretching the laws of physics far enough with the current overflowing punnet of raspberries.

Yes I have zero tolerance for people who sit in Utopia !!!!!!

[gregeric]

fruit, I think you are overlooking that the poster is possibly somewhat further down the age & learning scales than you. Your posts serve only to extinguish their enthusiasm before it has had chance to blossom. Rather than mocking, try sharing your knowledge.

[jamesh]

Thread cleaned of unnecessarily harsh tone.

Spoilsport.
If was just FotL being normal for a thread created by someone who, probably, needs to do a little bit more research before posting on here.

I love the garden shed hardware designers who think that Eben and your team aren't already stretching the laws of physics far enough with the current overflowing punnet of raspberries.

Yes I have zero tolerance for people who sit in Utopia !!!!!!

I also have zero tolerance for people who are condescending to new forum members who need education, not abuse.

[hawke0777]

i understand that you can up the cores on it, but why is that such an insult 1.2 is laggy and you can only run one function

What do you mean "you can only run one function" ?
You did realize that the Pi2 and Pi3 have four CPU cores each ?

i have a pi b and a pi 3 the pi b even overclocked it will not run but one function(one program) the pi3 is a little bit better, and i will say it is outstanding as my car radio will share that sometime, when i am not being ridiculed for asking a simple question, i am not trying to for lack of a better word dummy down these forums i realize some of you have more then a coursera.org understanding of these boards.....i just know "back in the day" and sometimes today also you can double up on the cpu and ram its done with todays servers ie xeon dual processor blade server. i realize we are dealing with a chip that is primarily seen in a cell phone and perhaps its more involved then to take a chip and put it on the output of another chip.....i think the root of my question is if regular cpu(your amd's and your intels) can be "overclocked" (i believe this is the term that they are using when people are taking and building there own boards and puting multible cpu's on it.) then why cant the cortex a-7, every one wants to be sheldon from the "big bang theory" but no one wants to be a teacher thats whats wrong with this world....i am not here to insult just want to know why you cant do it....

[DougieLawson]

The problems you've got to solve are 1) shared memory and 2) processor signalling.

Both of those need an incredible bandwidth between the engines to give you a useful multi-threading, multitasking, multiprocessing system. The first is needed so that you don't have to keep reading data from relatively slow external data stores. The second is needed so that one processor updating shared memory can signal the other processor when it's done because if it was a free for all your data would have no integrity. Locking to synchronise processes and prevent overlapping updates has an enormous CPU cost (as you scale up there comes a point where that costs more than adding an additional processor gives you).

Once you have your multi-threading, multitasking, multiprocessing, high speed, parallel computer you still need a workload that can be split into chunks, have the chunks run on an engine each and then re-assemble the results. Because a single-threaded process on a uni-processor is still a single-threaded process on a high speed, highly parallel processor complex and will take just as long to complete.

We've got that hardware stuff complete with shared memory working with mainframes, it's taken 60 years and billions of dollars. That doesn't stop us having the lone monolithic COBOL programs that can only run on one engine. Database and transaction manager workloads will run highly parallel because they're made of small short lived things (like scanning a tin of beans at the supermarket checkout, or getting £10 from a bank ATM).

So "lets just add a second CPU" may sound simple but it really isn't simple at all. It's much the same with "will my cluster of 16 raspberries run faster". It's all about the workload and whether that's been converted to run in parallel.

[jamesh]

i understand that you can up the cores on it, but why is that such an insult 1.2 is laggy and you can only run one function

What do you mean "you can only run one function" ?
You did realize that the Pi2 and Pi3 have four CPU cores each ?

i have a pi b and a pi 3 the pi b even overclocked it will not run but one function(one program) the pi3 is a little bit better, and i will say it is outstanding as my car radio will share that sometime, when i am not being ridiculed for asking a simple question, i am not trying to for lack of a better word dummy down these forums i realize some of you have more then a coursera.org understanding of these boards.....i just know "back in the day" and sometimes today also you can double up on the cpu and ram its done with todays servers ie xeon dual processor blade server. i realize we are dealing with a chip that is primarily seen in a cell phone and perhaps its more involved then to take a chip and put it on the output of another chip.....i think the root of my question is if regular cpu(your amd's and your intels) can be "overclocked" (i believe this is the term that they are using when people are taking and building there own boards and puting multible cpu's on it.) then why cant the cortex a-7, every one wants to be sheldon from the "big bang theory" but no one wants to be a teacher thats whats wrong with this world....i am not here to insult just want to know why you cant do it....

As well as answering your original question, it might be worth figuring out why your Pi seems to be running slowly.

[ghp]

@hawke0777
Do you have a concrete problem that you want to solve, or was that a rather theoretical question ?

Overclocking is difficult, as thermal design, pcb layout and peripheral speed will limit this. And you gain only a few percent of performance.

Bringing multiple processors on one board is somewhat theoretical, as hardware, firmware and os-support would be expensive.
Multiple xenos in a server environment are then on different blades, each one a complete computer. This goes close to the proposal to use a supercomputer.

YCN pointed to supercomputer clusters. I have heard a presentation some time ago in Trier about using a pi cluster with 16+1 boards used to educate people writing algorithms for this type of machines. Hardware is quite simple for a cluster, but software is a challenge. This area is very interesting if you want to compute weather forecasts or earn a zillion at stock exchange.

Back to the pi. If you need fast response for hardware signals, you could head for dedicated hardware support with fast microcontrollers or fpga. https://github.com/Guzunty/Pi/wiki use a small fpga for all sort of IO. In my projects, I often use a (quite slow) atmel328 to acquire and preprocess hardware signals. There are faster boards around, the 'particle photon' runs at 120MHz.

Hope this helps
Gerhard

[hawke0777]

Thank you all for changing the temperament from ridicule to teach and this is theory can you put a go between chip sort of a conductor in between the two chips to get them to sync without changing how the software is written? PS someone said I should check the pi a that I have to see why it's running slowly.......Can't turned it into a retro-pi for my stepson he likes it and I'm going to admit I'm a noob but I'm willing to learn if you give me the right knowledge and also patiences....Once agian ty those that have turned this thread away from insulting to teaching....

[ghp]

Hello,
if you run a PI-A, then an upgrade to a PI-3 would result in a great speed up. The PI-3 has more memory, more cores, and a 'faster' CPU.
Although most software runs on only one core, the system as a whole is faster as all the programs running in parallel do not need to share a single CPU, but have 4 cores available.
Hope this helps,
Gerhard

[gregeric]

The questions you raise are easy to pose, but difficult to answer. Those of us who have grown up with more simple compute platforms have a good understanding of how memory & cpu are connected, and what is possible, or not, and why it seems daft to ask such questions.

The Raspberry Pi is a cheap device, belying its inherent complexity. It runs an OS developed over years by many, many people. If you were able to implement a change in the hardware as you envisage ( 2 boards connected = 2 x processors, 2 x memory, through some non-existent bus ) then some of that man-years of software will have to be re-written.

But it turns out there's no way to connect two Pi, or Pi processors, other than by USB/Network, which limits what your two-up Pi can do.

The only way to connect two Pi 'brains' in a meaningful way is inside the chip itself, and that is what you have in the Pi2 or Pi3 & their variants with more than one arm core. So only a job for the elite few who are involved in chip design.

Edited to add:

What your asking is similar to fusing two people to make one super-person. The best technology we currently have for that is to have them talk to each other, much like we can link two Pis over USB/network.

We cannot wire together their spinal chords so they can move one another's limbs, nor can we link their brains somehow to make one super-person. Likewise Pis.