Is 4 GB the Limit for the Raspberry Pi 4? (opens in new tab)

Ive been running raspberry pis on sd cards for years and really haven't had any issues. And if I did have an issue I’d just fire up a new sd card and dd the disk image back on.

It’s actually one of the great features of the PI IMO, having the ability to quickly swap disks and reboot. Reminds me of the computers and video games of yesterday.

A major product challenge of eMMC in a design is the requirement to supply a means of flashing data onto the storage device when the CPU can't boot from the eMMC (or the disk is corrupted).

The SDCard solves this problem fairly well (although the solution requires a reasonable level of computer literacy due to the filesystems and raw block device access needed, however its a good fit for the Pi user demographic).

Other systems solve this chicken/egg problem by having a tool that runs on a PC that can perform the programming of attached storage, often by downloading code and data into a CPUs RAM and then having it flash to the disk. Exposing JTAG to Pi customers however is a step too far and would require more expensive external JTAG hardware to be needed per customer as well.

If I was Pi, I'd put a 10cent USB stick IC onto the board that connects in parallel to the eMMC and enable the board to be plugged into any USB host and mounted as external storage. Some programmable logic (get one of the Silego 10cent programmable logic ICs) would be needed to prevent the USB from being mounted when the system was running - I'd probably add in a button or switch that is read at power on and determines which interface gets to see the eMMC. It would need to hold either the Pi chip or the USB IC in reset depending on which function was selected.

A second option would be to put an USB eMMC protocol stack into the BootROM, but this would need LittleKernel or something similar in the BootROM and its non-trivial to get right!

This! When I saw a new Pi was announced with multiple models I dearly hoped for one with optional reliable on board storage. The MicroSD card is easy to use, but just not remotely close to reliable enough as the only kind of onboard storage for many use cases.

I migrated a few years ago to the ASU’s Up! Board - same dimensions, GPIO, general layout as a Pi but with quad core atom, 32GB onboard storage, 4gb of ram and “proper” gigabit Ethernet. No more micro SD card failures (I’m aware usb and network boot exist for the Pi but does not fit my needs).

This Pi 4 ticks all of those boxes except for the storage. So close to a truly great little home server device.

Relevant: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1484362#p...

What's the write speed comparison for the Pi 4 and an equivalent SBC with eMMC? I'm very tempted to buy one for general purpose compute but I'm wondering if I should get the RockPro instead (inferior software support but theoretically superior performance).

Not necessarily: Physical memory and virtually addressable memory are two different things. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension. Not sure how that works on the Pi though.

The Pi 4 is an ARM64 device that they're still running in armhf mode?!

Haven't the RPi's all been ARM64 since the Pi 2?

Nano Pi T4 $109 [1]

6-core, 64-bit, 4GB ram, EMMC, GbE, Wifi5 (AC), HDMI 2.0 (4k), USB3

Best software besides Rasberry I've seen is from these guys. Great build quality too.

1: https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

Beyond the OrangePI boards at the same price point as RPi, I like the UP boards which use x86 compatible chips for that $100-200+ bracket, you get good, fast, processors with decent memory options and don't have to screw about with weird android-orientated hardware.

Depends what you mean by "similar in spirit", but there are a smorgasboard of single board computers and self-contained computers out there at a multitude of different price points.

If you're looking for just a small computer, the Intel NUC is a good place to start.

Slower CPU than the Rpi4, but the Jetson Nano's GPU makes for a reasonable desktop experience. $99

Also, a refurb Asus Chromebox would be around $150 if you want x86.

Software support (up to date distro, timely security parches to kernel, reasonably unbuggy drivers et ) is usually the weak point of arm boards. Even raspbian traditionally lags a bit there but most other boards are worse. You are probably better off with low end x86.

I really like Hardkernel's Odroid boards. They have a big catalog for many use cases and are a lot more performant than the Pi but less open hardware/driver wise and lack on board WiFi/BT. But as others have said, there are A LOT of similar boards. If you want something very small, the NanoPi boards look nice but I have never tried one of them.

Basically every Atom board ever.

How about a used lenovo m92p

I just fired up VS Code and it looks like it's using around 300MB. No doubt that's a lot, and it will go up as I actually use it, bit I'd still think you could get by with with much less than 8GB.

I cross-compile to ARM all day long. The idea of editing and building on the target completely eludes me. I guess I shouldn't worry - it's job security.