Hi, I'm Jason Bradbury and I'm joined by Wil Bennett, VP of Technology
how cool is that for a job title?
of pi-top
and we're gonna be talking about Raspberry Pi 4
but perhaps first of all you should tell us a little bit about pi- top
in the work that you guys do
so pi-top is a creative company
uses the Raspberry Pi at the heart of its makers' architecture obviously because it is
everything we do is powered by the Raspberry Pi the new Raspberry Pi is
hugely relevant to us and it being so much more powerful
is a total game changer for us
Okay so we're gonna see it at work, we've got Raspberry Pi 4 there
we've got the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ next
We're gonna be doing some comparisons but
first of all you've been playing with the new Raspberry Pi for a few months
it's all been top-secret stuff
It's very hard to keep it secret
What are your first impressions about Raspberry Pi 4?
I am blown away by it
It's a totally different ball game to the previous Raspberry Pi so we've seen
the total overhaul of everything: the processor the RAM
we've got faster USB
we've got faster Ethernet on it and the big thing that's
changed about it is we can now do dual video output
That's the big headline, isn't it?
That's the big change
Two micro HDMI output
We've been waiting for this for years and years
and finally, we have two video outputs that can run
simultaneously from the Raspberry Pi
A slight upgrade in terms of power half an AMP, am I right?
And that's to do what with exactly?
So this time we've moved up from the old USB micro connector that they had
they've moved up to SBC which does provide a bit more juice before it was
rated at 2.5 amps and now it's 3 amps and that's basically because there is
there's more going on under the hood so they need more power for it
they've stepped down from a 14 nanometer technology to a 28 nanometer which again
is something that a lot of Raspberry Pi fans are waiting for, for years
And it means they can squeeze a lot more out of the same sort of total area
so the thing I'm most excited about, and I'm sure that everyone watching this shares my
enthusiasm is the fact that we've got more grunts with a whole power in Pi 4
but why, what about the architecture?
is gonna give us all that juice?
So this time we've got a ARM Cortex-A72 in there which is an upgrade
from the a 53 bit was in there before it's still clocks at about 1.5 gigahertz
which is not too dissimilar to how it was before but they've recent respond
things under the surface so that now you're gonna get a lot more bang for
your buck from that sort of processor
Respun is tech speak for what exactly?
Tech speak for we don't exactly know yet
We've only been told limited information
It's been optimized
It's been optimized. What we know is that it's got the same ARMv8 architecture but somehow
they've managed to squeeze out a whole lot more performance from it
That'll do for me thank you very much. What about the GPU?
The GPU is similarly mysterious
We presume it's something similar to the 3B+, which has a
video call for
but again since they've now gone up with 4K screens, two 4K screens
you can only assume that they've totally respun that to make something
much more powerful as well
But when it comes to RAM the figures are more obvious, aren't they?
The figures are very black and white and pretty cool so
whereas before we've only had one gigabyte of LPDDR2
old school tech, if you like
We now have one, two or four gigabytes of
LPDDR4, which is a huge difference you know it's like racing a
Fiat 500 against an F1 car, you know, massive difference
So you're saying that Pi 4 is an F1 car
It's basically an F1 car on a circuit board, yes
I love it!
I'm itching to do some tests, actually right now, right here and you've got some
bits under there. Grab those and let's set up the first test to show the
speed difference between the Pi 3 B+ and the Pi 4
What have we got?
So we've got two
HTDs these ones. These are 2 terabytes, identical drives USB 3.0
right they're both USB 3.0
That's exactly right
So the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is gonna be running
this at USB 2.0 speeds and obviously the 4 we'll be running it at full USB 3.0 speeds
Let's do it let's show the difference
Can you just explain why your screen's asset is so much smaller?
so this is one of the really cool things
about the Raspberry Pi 4, is that we're actually running this screen in full 4K resolution
And this one is just running in 1080p
so actually as far as
the Raspberry Pi is concerned the window that it's rendered there is the same size in
terms of pixels but on a 1080 screen that's what a window of that size looks
like on a 4K screen that's how much smaller
It is it's about one-quarter of the size
Three, two, one, drop
That felt pretty
Okay so you're at 4%
I'm at 25
No look at the difference!
I'm up at 40% so this
is what I'm talking about F1 car versus you know, your Fiat 500
over there isn't doing too well, it's not coping on the main stage here and
obviously, the F1 car is already finished the race
Done
That's it and you're still at 30%
Okay so test number two Gigabit Ethernet, right?
Yeah
Alright let's do it
So you've opened up access to your
MacBook. The MacBook physically is actually underneath the table here but
via network, it's acting as a file server
That's exactly right. Connected it over
We've got a gigabit switch so everything is nice and fast so the speed that we'll
be seeing here is gonna be completely down to the speed of the Raspberry Pi's
Ethernet connection
So they're both connected but one of them, 3B+
is going to be, theoretically, considerably slower and the Pi 4
Should be
We're going to find out
Is only coping at 300 megabit this one should be
full gigabit so let's find out
Three, two, one, go!
So I'm off to a fine start
now at 10% already
I'm not quite flying as much
I'd normally be
pleased with my 10% if it wasn't that you've got 33%
Well so 10 and 33 like I said, we should be saying about three
times so it looks like the numbers are adding up yeah it's about three times as
fast I'm at 60% you're at 20% so actually, it's
bang on three exactly times faster
Excellent!
So I'm basically done here 90.95
And I'm still on 37%
and this is what has separated the Raspberry Pi from other devices, faster devices things like
Odroid, for example, that people use in their home networking set up is the
Raspberry Pi has just been too slow to take seriously when you're trying to
copy files across the network but when you've got blistering speeds like this
suddenly you're looking at a whole different product
Test number three
So we're gonna use the chromium web browser. We're gonna open up a bunch of web pages
the same web pages but, importantly, quite a lot of them and what we're hoping to
see is that things are gonna be a bit more slow and laggy on your 3B+ and
a bit more punchy on my 4
Right, you count us in?
Okay. Three, two, one... go!
So I'm open already and you're just behind me there
so if we want to start with your saved bookmark tabs at the top
Yeah
So we're gonna start with this one
that's a YouTube video, 4K video of Costa Rica
first thing I can found in YouTube that was in 4K
I'm loading up. So my page is
already loaded here
I mean I did click it fractionally slower than you but not
this much slower
Wow
Did you definitely click it?
Yeah, you did look at that!
So this is what I'm talking about so I'm already a few seconds on my way through my video
Ok there we go
So next one we're gonna open up the second
bookmark you've got here which is the reddit page for the Raspberry Pi forum so
if you want to do that as a new tab so we'll click the middle button there so
that's three, two, one, go!
We'll move over to that tab now
and we'll see who gets to it first
And at the same time, let's open a
couple more tabs as well. So if you want a middle click the pi-top homepage
bookmark there and the Hackaday one as well
Three, two, one, click!
Three, two one, click.
Ok so hopefully I should be way ahead of you here so I'm if I open up
the pi-top page
Mine is just frozen
So you're into pi-top
I've got the page loaded up
oh, I was about, what? two seconds
behind you. We'd have to, forgive us if you're if you've got a stopwatch
on this but I was roughly two seconds behind that
You're still there actually
You're still learning some of the elements of the page and over on
You're right
Hopefully meanwhile everyone hackaday
next time over I should also already be there, I hope
I am. So I've already got
the page loaded there, in the background
Okay, clicked Hackaday a fraction of a second
after you but not this much of a fraction
Yeah so you are suffering from
3B+ chromium syndrome
Very frustrating, multiple tabs open, things are very slow
Raspberry Pi 4 that problem is gone away
And it still hasn't loaded the Hackaday!
It looks like you might have actually
frozen altogether
I have
obviously I'm not referring to massive battle rigs
with multiple liquid-cooled graphics cards but are we getting to a scenario
where Pi 4 is almost equivalent to a basic entry of a laptop that comes
integrated graphics and such?
We are slowly sneaking up on the point where you might
not notice the difference at all, actually
Now that we've got 4GB of RAM
now that we've got a Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0 you know, you're starting to
see these performance jumps that are taking us towards the point where there
might not be any difference it's all soon between using a Raspberry Pi and
using, for example, an entry-level Windows laptop
Which considering that
you know one of those laptops is going to set you back probably four, five, six
times the price, at least of the Raspberry Pi
That's very significant
Massive, yeah
Okay so as you might gather
from the image on both of our screens we're now gonna do an image processing
test we're using GIMP
Yep, so we got the Linux answer to Photoshop
We got the same image up on both screens and this is a 1600 by 839 pixel picture but again
because this is a 4k screen and that's a 1080 screen they do look
slightly different so if you're go to filters at the top there we're going to
apply a quite mathematically heavy filter so that's under artistic we're
gonna do the water pixels filter
So if you open that up and it'll bring up this dialog menu
Okay
And then if you want to count us in will perform the filter at
the same time we'll see who finishes first
Okay. Three, two, one, click!
So when we're done it should look like a
nice sort of watercolour sort of painting
I'm done. I'm ready
You are Fiat 500 in your way along
Nothing's happening at all at the moment
At least nothing that we can observe
So I think what might have happened here is, this has happened before, is that
because we've got more RAM on the Pi 4 and more processing power
It's quite possible at the 3 B+ it's just...
It's crashed
Is totally crashed
Obviously, we were waiting for something to happen and in fact, nothing was ever going to happen
We've seen this a couple of times during our tests because I'll try things out on
the Raspberry Pi 4 and think yeah, this works fine the 3B+ will be able to handle it
Yeah that's my guess
Actually, we didn't set this up at all
this was completely, just happened ad lib but that's a good example
of what I'm talking about
So there you have it
Dual 4K screens, more power, more RAM, faster USB Gigabit Ethernet, and add to
that pi-top [4] integrated screen, battery power, and thermal management and
of course, that amazing makers' architecture
and you have the most
powerful and versatile device in its class
If you want to get behind it you
know what to do
www.pi-top.com/kickstarter
Thanks Wil
Thanks very much Jason, cheers
you