Re: New Pico2

Am 13.08.24 um 17:55 schrieb John Larkin:

I could not find a CPU chip manual in an hour for my new 8GB RP5 that allowed me to use SPI, so I shelved it and went with the old BBB and its PRU. So far about documentation excellence.

Gerhard

Try a media optimised OS such as Kodi, rather than a general purpose distro if you want to use a Pi as a media player.

Don't confuse the availability of a larger power supply with the Pi 5 taking more power - it's not much different to the Pi 4. However, as you

No, it's a new SOC which is about 3x faster than a Pi 4, and can use NVME SSDs and other PCIe devices.

---druck

Presumably that was only to activate the decoder hardware. Otherwise FFmpeg, VLC etc could play it just fine, just with a bit more CPU usage.

No, that is true, and my Pi 4 can just handle two USB SSD drives. JUST. Not three though.

BUT even doing sod all it still draws enough to get its temperature up into the 50's°C. As do the drives into the 40s°C

Which the Pi zero also does

I think that as a desktop machine Pi 4s and 5s power consumption is approaching that of a good intel chipset *for equivalent performance*.

(these temps may be of interest)

PI 4B (headless) equipped with 2 SSD ======================= CPU temp=52.1'C Disk 1= 40°C Disk 2 =44°C

PI zero 1 (headless) =========== CPU temp=43.9'C

PI zero 2 (headless) =========== CPU temp=39.5'C

The rise of ARM caused Intel and AMD to pay a *lot* more attention to power consumption which has indeed resulted in the gap closing especially at desktop levels of performance.

It was to pay the patent licence fees for using the hardware decoder. FOSS software decode got around them by not having anyone the patent holders could meaningfully sue.

Since that was 12 years ago, perhaps the patents have now expired?

Theo

Well MIPs per mW is where its at these days as parallelism can sorta increase MIPS to whatever level you want.

Funnily enuff, the race to more MIPS is likely to drive adoption of nuclear power more than any other factor...

I don't see data centres 'throttling back' servers after sunset, or on calm days...

Linux can be as small as you want. Look at Damn Small Linux, for example. You can actually build a kernel to run on certain CPUs with no memory- management hardware.

There was actually a whole lot of computing power on the ground, in the form of those IBM mainframes, backing up the guys in space. Everything they did had to be managed in coordination with ground control, all the steps worked out in advance.

Bit more Government management of the process back then, bit more trust to private corporations like Boeing, with its stellar reputation for relentlessly pursuing reliability over profits, these days.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

Hohmann worked out the details of travel around the solar system using the computing power in his head and the storage afforded by a pencil and paper. The computing requirements for space travel are not that large.

High quality engineering is a major requirement of space travel. NASA in the sixties had an effectively infinite budget and a culture of careful engineering going back to Edward Murphy of Murphy's law.

Boeing are busy acquiring a reputation of careless engineering.

In the USA, Big Data is either buying-up the full output of nuclear plants, or buying the nuclear plants themselves.

Throttling in tune with renewable generation, maybe not, but "herding" multiple virtual servers onto a reduced number of physical hosts in tune with demand and shutting down some of the physical hosts is done.

He was only able to come up with “minimum energy” transfer orbits that went fairly directly from body A to body B. Since then, we have worked out more complicated low-energy “slingshot” orbits that involve bouncing around the Solar System to match velocities with difficult-to-reach target bodies like comets. That required real computing power: there’s no way anybody could have worked that out with pencil and paper, even with a slide rule.

And what about “halo” orbits, like at Earth-Moon L2, where the Chinese put their relay station for maintaining contact with their far-side rover, and where the James Webb telescope is located? You think you could work out the right numbers for those without a modern digital electronic computer? They’re not even properly stable, for a start.

True, that. But are they too big to be allowed to fail?

But there are multiple Chinese languages. I know they are commonly called “dialects”, but it is also pointed out that, say, Mandarin and Cantonese are more different from each other than, say, English and Norwegian.

There is the saying “a language is a dialect with an army”. I suppose there is a corollary to that: China ceased being a bunch of independent states around 220 BC.