Raspberry Pi 4 Thread - general discussion

[HawaiianPi]

Another question for the Engineers: I just installed the latest version of Raspberry Pi Desktop ("buster"), and there is a new option in raspi-config for "Raspberry Pi 4 video output" which requires a Raspberry Pi 4. What is this for? (Is this for setting the screen resolutions?)

Pretty sure that has to do with video acceleration on the new Pi 4B, and likely other unique Pi4 features like 4K and dual HDMI.

One notable step forward is that for Raspberry Pi 4, we are retiring the legacy graphics driver stack used on previous models. Instead, we’re using the Mesa “V3D” driver developed by Eric Anholt at Broadcom over the last five years. This offers many benefits, including OpenGL-accelerated web browsing and desktop composition, and the ability to run 3D applications in a window under X. It also eliminates roughly half of the lines of closed-source code in the platform.

[RichardUK]

Great news indeed!

I ordered two boards - a 1GB, and a 2GB board, however I cannot find a 4GB board in stock in Canada, US, or UK.

Please post here if you know any place eith 4GB in stock.

Btw the additional i2c and uarts are great for my purposes.

Last I check, the 4GB models won't be available till almost end of July. I ordered the 2GB but won't ship till July 5th.

It's strange that they would have different memory size versions. They should have made different form factors instead, like the Pi Zero and A+.

Just checked Pimoroni and they seem to be out of stock. But I did order a 4gig from Pimoroni this morning, so were available.

[HawaiianPi]

Just checked Pimoroni and they seem to be out of stock. But I did order a 4gig from Pimoroni this morning, so were available.

Pretty much everywhere I've looked is either listed as out of stock or back-ordered, which I presume means the same thing (no one actually has them yet). A few places have release dates of August 1st, so end of July kind of tracks with that. Sucks if they are producing the lower mem models first. I'll be very surprised if those outsell the 4GB models when they are all available. I was tempted to try and order a 2GB model, but I really want 4GB (so I ordered two of those).

Now if I can just find the strength to be patient...

Looking on the bright side, maybe by the time the 4GB is available most of the early release issues with Raspbian Buster will have been fixed.

[Andyroo]

Glad they are OOS - would have hated to decide on a Pi or wallpaper now the builders done

Seriously though - congrats to the team for an impressive product.

[W. H. Heydt]

Another question for the Engineers: I just installed the latest version of Raspberry Pi Desktop ("buster"), and there is a new option in raspi-config for "Raspberry Pi 4 video output" which requires a Raspberry Pi 4. What is this for? (Is this for setting the screen resolutions?)

Pretty sure that has to do with video acceleration on the new Pi 4B, and likely other unique Pi4 features like 4K and dual HDMI.

I would expect that to be related to there being 2 HDMI outputs and allowing you to configure how they are to be used.

[alphanumeric]

Now the really question is - when will the new Raspberry Pi Zero with 1gb ram and quad core cpu be out?

When the Pi 4A is released.

[SpikoPath]

Optimal SdCard for the Raspberry Pi 4B

I am assuming that a Class 10 will be sufficient enough.

Just wanted to get everyone else's thoughts on the surface subject.

[epoch1970]

[Not sure where you are buying them from, but they cost no more for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same price at local hardware stores. Same price from Amazon (USA).

I surmise M2.5 is a faux metric size, IIRC it matches closely one of these colorful imperial sizes that of course I can't recall.
Expensive in Europe, that's my experience until now. But enough of that already

[jahboater]

Optimal SdCard for the Raspberry Pi 4B

I am assuming that a Class 10 will be sufficient enough.

Just wanted to get everyone else's thoughts on the surface subject.

A1 class

https://www.sdcard.org/developers/overv ... index.html

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07 ... UTF8&psc=1

[hippy]

[DELETED]

[bscphil]

May I ask whether RPI supports things such as 10 bit video decoding, Dolby Vision and Atmos? Thx.

HEVC hardware decode supports 4kp60, 10-bit. Audio output is pretty much unchanged, but the HDMI audio channels now support 8x192kHz bitrates.

Thank you for confirming this! I agree with what someone else said - that the specs pages are inaccurate until they clarify what HEVC profiles are supported by the SoC decoding hardware.

Before I go buy a bunch of these, can you also confirm that Rec. 2100 is supported and works as expected? Basically, if I have an HDR display connected to the Pi 4 via a HDMI 2.0 cable, will the Pi correctly transmit the HDR10 / HLG information to the display so that HDR "just works"? Or is this information stripped and the video plays in SDR? If it works, you guys may have just revolutionized the HTPC SBC marketplace. Thanks!

Hi, I'm still hoping to get confirmation of this. For others who may not know what I'm talking about, this is crucial if you're planning to use the Pi 4 as a 4K HTPC. If you have a newer 4K TV, it most likely supports 10bit HDR. These work differently than traditional displays: while with SDR displays your system is responsible for using a display calibration profile for correct colors in the gamut of the display, with a so-called HDR display (which doesn't necessarily imply a larger gamut), you need a platform that supports the necessary signals over HDMI to get wide color gamut display.

Support for this was added to Windows software fairly recently. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... r-settings

What I'm attempting to confirm here is that the Pi supports the same. Someone has already confirmed that it supports HEVC 10 bit decoding, but until we know that HDR / WCG is supported in the compositor and HDMI driver, the Pi 4's usefulness as a video platform is still in doubt.

[Gavinmc42]

blender runs fine on a rasberry pi 3 with the opengl driver activated and it even is in the raspbian repository. (i just needed to change some settings regarding the opengl selection method in blender's preferences.)

I have had Blender4 Artists 0.95 working in Gentoo64 on a 3B+, it had a more up to date OpenGL than the old Raspbian;)
Now it should really be usable with a Pi4B4.
The B4A GUI is a bit easier to learn than the normal Blender.
Mind you running it in 2 x 4K screens will probably slow it down again

[firecat]

I'm woundering if this opens up to getting more programs something like Blender 3d software, VirtualBox, newer browsers to use and more.

Web browsers, what is wrong with chromium-browser version 74 in Raspbian Buster ?

Its google, they will track you and also version 75 has the unremovable UI.

[Andyroo]

Do not mix Chrome browser and Chromium up

The Chromium projects include Chromium and Chromium OS, the open-source projects behind the Google Chrome browser

From: https://www.chromium.org/

[mikronauts]

Thanks, I will keep checking.

Great news indeed!

I ordered two boards - a 1GB, and a 2GB board, however I cannot find a 4GB board in stock in Canada, US, or UK.

Please post here if you know any place eith 4GB in stock.

Btw the additional i2c and uarts are great for my purposes.

Last I check, the 4GB models won't be available till almost end of July. I ordered the 2GB but won't ship till July 5th.

It's strange that they would have different memory size versions. They should have made different form factors instead, like the Pi Zero and A+.

Just checked Pimoroni and they seem to be out of stock. But I did order a 4gig from Pimoroni this morning, so were available.

[DavidS]

Looking interesting. It will be great to play with a 4GB RAM RPi with faster RAM and a newer VC GPU. Finally maybe an ARM fast enough to use Linux as the main OS on . Once I can afford one I will be placing an order (for a 2GB version).

The OS upgrade also has my attention, going to an OS base that currently does have OpenSCAD (my one complaint with Raspbian Stretch [other than it being slow, though that has always been the case of *n*x type systems]).

Too bad it will not help with my on again off again internet connection (have to love the lack of reliable cellular reception).

How far different is the GPU from the VideoCore IV? Beings that the blog says it is a VC6 (Video Core VI), I am guessing that there will be some notable differences in support, especially for baremetal programmers.

[plugwash]

umm the openscad situation doesn't seem to have changed between stretch and buster, it's not available for armel/armhf because debian builds qt on armel/armhf against opengl es :/

[DavidS]

umm the openscad situation doesn't seem to have changed between stretch and buster, it's not available for armel/armhf because debian builds qt on armel/armhf against opengl es :/

Ok, and it takes a lot of work to build OpenSCAD. Well at least there are more alternatives now.

[fruitoftheloom]

Nice to read what the lovers and haters out there post in various places.

As per usual much wrong information and assumptions.


I have been holding off replacing my 2B v1.1 but IF ChromiumOS can be run on the 4B it would be a cost effective replacement for my Asus ChromeBit which is fast approaching end of official support.

Maybe Neverware will finally offer ????

[jbeale]

Has anyone measured the current draw from +5V of the new Pi4 is when it has just booted up and is just sitting there, before any user input?
I understand it can draw more power under load, but I am just wondering how the baseline power compares with Pi3 and Pi2. With the smaller process node, could it even use less power at idle? I am guessing USB3 must use more energy than USB2 to support the much higher data rate, but I don't know how much. Also the higher DRAM speed must take more energy I presume, even for the basic 1 GB.

[dutta_d1]

Anybody tested fullscreen youtube playback? If this works smooth, even with 720p, this is a board worth upgrading for casual web browsing.

[Gavinmc42]

I saw one benchmark, about 500ma+ for old 3B+ and 600ma+ for 4B.
When running the 4B was a tiny bit lower, er 1.14amp v 1.12Amp?

[PeterO]

Has anyone measured the current draw from +5V of the new Pi4 is when it has just booted up and is just sitting there, before any user input?
I understand it can draw more power under load, but I am just wondering how the baseline power compares with Pi3 and Pi2. With the smaller process node, could it even use less power at idle? I am guessing USB3 must use more energy than USB2 to support the much higher data rate, but I don't know how much. Also the higher DRAM speed must take more energy I presume, even for the basic 1 GB.

Alex has updated his power page..
https://raspi.tv/2019/how-much-power-do ... asurements
PeterO

[fruitoftheloom]

I'm woundering if this opens up to getting more programs something like Blender 3d software, VirtualBox, newer browsers to use and more.

Web browsers, what is wrong with chromium-browser version 74 in Raspbian Buster ?

Its google, they will track you and also version 75 has the unremovable UI.

Google Chrome has never been "officially" available for ARMHF.

chromium-browser is offered in Raspbian Stretch and Buster.

Do not post misleading information

[hojnikb]

EMMC really isn't a very good option IMO. Less reliable than SD cards over multiple writes and you cannot replace it when it fails, like you can with an SD card.

Mind sharing some info/paper talking about that?

Thanks in advance!

Nope, personal experience. SD cards have wear leveling, EMMC generally doesn't, so if using them for the same thing, the EMMC will fail first. depends on the FS.

That can't possibly be true. Most if not all flash devices i came across had some sort of wear levelling. eMMC would die real quick if it didn't have any kind of wear levelling. Remember, cheap flash these days is only good for a few 100 rewrites before it starts showing errors, so poking a single sector would destroy it real quick.

You must be thinking of raw nand chips, that connect to ONFI or toggleDDR interface, these obviously have no wear levelling, as external flash controller does that (ssds are such devices for example).

Functionally, eMMC is identical to SD cards (same bus protocol) it's just soldered to board, instead of being in a slot.

Edit:
Just for kicks, i dug the data sheet for the chip, used on compute module and sure enough, it supports wear levelling just fine.