mahjongg wrote: ↑Mon Aug 05, 2019 6:03 pm
It was probably deleted because we generally don't like it when people use our forum to advertise competing products here.
realising its not a competing product at all I relented, and moved it to off-topic.
I see. Thanks for the explanation, and for relenting.
Heater wrote:
"Stay out if it is *no interest to you*."
Yes, indeed. But I still can;t figure out what this thread is about.Just thought I would ask. Sorry.
No, I'm sorry. I really hadn't intended to create confusion, "advertise competing products", or start any flame wars. As the OP, if it helps, maybe I can explain what I had meant the thread to be about...
I originally used a Pi3B+ for my Kodi box and it worked surprisingly well but there was one (totally legal) add-on that I ran on it that was fairly sluggish perhaps because of bad coding in the add-on or the fact that it was all in Python which as an interpreted language. I felt that it could probably have benefited from more CPU power. Because of this I moved to what at the time was touted as one of the best boxes to run Kodi on, the nVidia Shield TV, although as already pointed out it is a world apart in price and I was only mentioning it in its role as a Kodi box so it is no way an alternative to pretty much any of the other use cases for a Pi.
Anyway, I was actually slightly underwhelmed by the improvement in CPU performance (as measured in how snappy the Kodi and add-on interfaces felt) when I moved to the Shield, there's was a definite improvement over the Pi3B+ but to me it' wasn't as much as I'd hoped but with the investment made I've stuck with the Shield until now. Then along comes the Pi4. This got me thinking about whether I could go back to using a Pi for my Kodi box which would also have the advantage of being more elegant since I do still use the Pi3B+ as a NAS so I go from a 2-box solution to a 1-box solution.
The question then becomes how would the performance compare with the Shield I use at the moment. As mentioned above, I believe my issues of sluggish Kodi response are down to certain Python addons needing a fair amount of CPU power thrown at them to overcome one or both of coding inefficiencies and/or interpretation overheads so a possible indicator of what my experience might be like were I to move my Kodi setup to a Pi4 would be comparative CPU benchmarks between a Pi4 and a Shield. That was the motivation behind my thread and the reason why I was hoping to discover some benchmarks comparing the Cortex-A57-based Tegra X1 SoC used by the Shield with the Pi4 Cortex-A72-based SoC.
By the way, far from being an advert for the Shield my hunch was that my thread would end up being an advert for the Pi4 since I'm hoping that the CPU performance of the Pi4 might well be better than the X1. I know that is at odds with what bomblord's app developers told him (they expected Pi4 to be ~ 3/4 of X1 performance based on "paper specs") but I wonder if they were just looking at the 1.9GHz X1 vs 1.5GHz Pi4 clock speeds and ignoring the significant architectural improvements in Cortex A72 vs A57 e.g. the A72 has a 5-wide out-of-order execution dispatcher vs 3-wide for A57 plus that design goal from ARM that I mentioned in my opening post to of a 90% performance improvement vs A57 (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A72). Put all that together and I would be seriously interested in seeing whether Pi4 might actually outperform Tegra X1 even given the lower clock speed.
Finally a couple of final points.
1 - When I used Pi3B+ to run Kodi I had no issues with GPU power so, even if Shield GPU is still much more powerful than even the Pi4 GPU, if the Pi3B+ GPU was good enough for Kodi (at least for the resolutions that I care about) then surely the Pi4 GPU will be more than good enough.
2 - The thread got slightly sidetracked into NAS when radiogalva mentioned no RAID NAS so I thought I should mention that I have been successfully running a RAID NAS on my Pi3B+ for a while. My hope that the greater memory on a Pi4 might also open up the possibility for me to transition my NAS to ZFS also seemed an appropriate observation at that point.
Anyway, I'm really sorry that I seem to have created confusion and ruffled some feathers. It wasn't my intention and far from being a post promoting Shield I felt it might well end up as a Pi4-is-better post at least for the Kodi use case, or at least that was and still is my hope.
Thanks also again to the mods for letting the thread run and not killing it dead. I am still hoping that some X1 vs pi4 SoC CPU benchmarks might emerge at some point.
