Raspberry Pi 4 8GB RAM available


Delightful Dude

Delightful Dude

Let's rock!
Joined
Nov 7, 2012
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Just got an email from my electronics store, Raspberry P4 with 8GB DDR4 RAM is available.
This isn't an affiliate link, just couldn't find any other information on the net:
https://electronics.semaf.at/Raspberry-Pi-4-B-4x-15GHz-CPU-8GB-DDR4-RAM-BLE5-WLAN?rel=mc

1590650808209.png
 
RAM is kinda confusing to me. The PS5 is only gonna have 16GB, but the RPi offers 8GB? Like, are we running out of stuff to do with all our RAM? Is 16GB the wall?

RPi to win the console wars confirmed.
 
Nintendo said:
If you're doing heaps of video editing and stuff, it's better if you have more RAM.
Click to expand...
I do my video transcoding for devices around the house on an on LGA775 machine. It's not quick, but I don't think it's RAM limited, it's currently spent the last 20 hours transcoding about three hours worth of 1080p videos for the TV, but that's slow because the TV doesn't support h264 (high) video format and needs converting down to plain h264. When I transcode stuff down to the resolution and framerate of my laptop, but leave the video format otherwise as is, it's much closer to real time, and this is an old desktop machine we're talking about here with only 4GB RAM and no swap. It came with 2GB RAM and I did max it out to 4 but it hasn't sped up video transcoding appreciably. A modern rPi probably has faster in-built h264 and 265 decoding, which should help.

You probably need more power for live video editing, but using ffmpeg I can crop, rescale, fade do pretty much anything you can do in a live video editor, I just need to work out what needs doing beforehand and set it going. More RAM might help for live video, I'm not sure, but sooner or later you can hold all of the video frames in ram that you need to do the work, and more RAM won't help. But then again I'm thinking about 1080p video but things are slowly going 4k, which I'd expect to need more ram.
 
JDTAY said:
RAM is kinda confusing to me. The PS5 is only gonna have 16GB, but the RPi offers 8GB? Like, are we running out of stuff to do with all our RAM? Is 16GB the wall?
Click to expand...

Memory is usually used because current storage (HDD/SDD) is much slower compared to RAM. This means the data from disk is copied into RAM, because it's faster, and usually it's put there just in case you need that data in the future.
The PS5 SSD is much faster meaning the data in RAM can be used for things that are really needed and less of a buffer for future items. And obviously it's a cost cutting measure, as the new XBox and PS5 have other expensive components already.

Why would they give a Raspberry Pi that much RAM? I assume because it was easy to do (maybe not even a pcb change) and people want to pay for it.
And I guess there is at least one person that complaint he filled the 4GB and he needed more RAM. Maybe now you can have a useful RAM disk, just for giggles.
 
levi said:
I do my video transcoding for devices around the house on an on LGA775 machine. It's not quick, but I don't think it's RAM limited, it's currently spent the last 20 hours transcoding about three hours worth of 1080p videos for the TV, but that's slow because the TV doesn't support h264 (high) video format and needs converting down to plain h264. When I transcode stuff down to the resolution and framerate of my laptop, but leave the video format otherwise as is, it's much closer to real time, and this is an old desktop machine we're talking about here with only 4GB RAM and no swap. It came with 2GB RAM and I did max it out to 4 but it hasn't sped up video transcoding appreciably. A modern rPi probably has faster in-built h264 and 265 decoding, which should help.

You probably need more power for live video editing, but using ffmpeg I can crop, rescale, fade do pretty much anything you can do in a live video editor, I just need to work out what needs doing beforehand and set it going. More RAM might help for live video, I'm not sure, but sooner or later you can hold all of the video frames in ram that you need to do the work, and more RAM won't help. But then again I'm thinking about 1080p video but things are slowly going 4k, which I'd expect to need more ram.
Click to expand...

Why spend hours transcoding? Why not have a pi or a firestick and simply sftp host the files.
 
Swordfish II said:
Why spend hours transcoding? Why not have a pi or a firestick and simply sftp host the files.
Click to expand...
Fair point. I started doing it because I like to have videos I can watch on my laptop while others in my household are watching something boring on TV. While my laptop can play videos from youtube in 1080p natively, it gets hot doing that and it can stutter sometimes, and when it only has a 600p screen it seems something of a waste. Then I started watching things other people want to see, and I already had a portable hard disc for my wii games, so put some videos on it and plugged that into the TV. The TV could originally play anything from youtube, but codecs don't stand still while this old TV does, so these days I need to convert them to something it can play to continue doing that. I could buy a cheap SBC, I suppose, but this hard disc starts up faster when you need it, and I don't believe in leaving computers on when they're not doing anything.
 
I lost track of Rapsberry Pi. Can someone tell me how many blobs are needed for Raspbeery Pi 4? I've searched a little (not much) but I can't seem to understand. Traditionally the Pis couldn't boot without GPU blobs. It seems that's no longer true. But can it boot blobless ? Can it output a screen blobless ? I imagine Wifi won't work without blobs, but what else ? I found binaries for EEPROM, but I'm not sure whether there is free source for those. I thought this would be in some wiki somewhere but I haven't found it.

Thank you.
 
I had a look in here: http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/dists/buster/firmware/binary-armhf/. It was a bit of a struggle because of MIME encoding and none of the text files were viewable without being downloaded, but I went through that pain and can tell you it almost entirely seems to be OpenGLES related binary blobs, with even none for the wifi. I don't know if this is all of them, but I am on the limits of my wits in finding out even this much.
 
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Thank you, @levi. But the last package there talks of bootloader. And it links to a repository with binaries and an unfree license . What I don't know is whether that's only needed for older RPis and there's a new free bootloader somewhere...
And this commit would seem to suggest blobs (including bootloader) are still used in RPi4, but I don't know if there're workarounds for RPi4 and they just try to do something similar for all RPis or there are no workarounds...
About wifi I've only found it should be an Cypress CYW43455 IP part. I've found someone trying to port u-boot to RPi4 (I think they say it works, with more or less features) but they seem to use binary firmware stuff too.
I guess if someone would have succeeded in installing a blobless u-boot and linux-libre or something like it, it would be easier to find. And since the board has like one year, maybe it's because it's not so easy :(
 
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