Recently an Igalia engineer posted a NUMA Emulation patch for the Pi 5 to the Linux Kernel mailing list. He said it could improve performance of Geekbench 6 scores up to 6% for single-core, and 18% for multicore.
My testing didn't quite match those numbers, but I did see a significant and consistent performance increase across both Geekbench 6:
And High Performance Linpack:
It's not cheap, but it's efficient. At least, that's my hope.
Over the past few months, I worked with a number of vendors to assemble what I hope will make an efficient but high-performance arm64 NAS. In the video embedded below, I've put together the following (some of these links are affiliate links):
This is the fastest Arm desktop in the world, yes, even faster than the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. And today, I made it even faster.
I upgraded everything: Faster RAM, 128 core CPU, 40 series GPU, I did it all, and we'll see how much we can obliterate the M2 Mac Pro.
128 cores—that's five times more cores, I'm also going to upgrade this thing from 96 all the way to 384 gigabytes of RAM. The Mac Pro? Sorry, it only goes up to 192.
And we're just in time for the new Cinebench 2024 benchmark, which—yes—this machine dominates.
Last week Microsoft started selling their $599 Windows Dev Kit 2023, formerly known as 'Project Volterra'.
I got my hands on one after a little bit of a shipping delay, and promptly started tearing it down to see what's inside. You can click here to browse the entire Twitter thread where I posted pictures of the box contents and teardown, or view it below:
In October 2020, after Raspberry Pi introduced the Compute Module 4, I started out on a journey to get an external graphics card working on the Pi.
At the time, it'd been over a decade since the last time I'd built a PC, and I had a lot to learn about PCI Express, the state of graphics card drivers in Linux, and PCI Express support on various ARM SoCs.
Recently I wanted to see whether I could get glmark2 (an OpenGL 2.0 and ES 2.0 benchmark tool) to run on a Raspberry Pi with an external graphics card (see this thread).
But glmark2 isn't available in any Pi repositories, so you have to build it from source:
sudo apt install -y meson libjpeg-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libudev-dev
git clone https://github.com/glmark2/glmark2.git
cd glmark2
meson setup build -Dflavors=drm-gl,drm-glesv2
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install
I built this for drm only, so it can run fullscreen without any X/Wayland environment. To run the full suite:
glmark2-drm
Or you can run a specific benchmark like glmark2-drm -b jellyfish.
64-bits. More is always better, right?
Well, not exactly. And that's why it's taken years for Raspberry Pi OS to add an officially-supported 64-bit version, in addition to the 32-bit version they've had since the original Pi came out.
Since May 2020, there's been a beta 64-bit version of Pi OS, but it wasn't intended for beginners, and was never linked from the main downloads page.
You had to kinda be 'in the know' to get it. And the reason for that is it's actually branched directly off of Debian Linux and had a few growing pains. But almost all those problems have been ironed out now, and apparently it's time for the Raspberry Pi's 64-bit era.
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.)
It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building Emacs.
Well, here's my quick story.
I've been doing a lot of work with Raspberry Pis lately—more specifically, work which often requires recompiling the Pi OS Linux kernel for the aarch64 architecture. I recompile the kernel enough I made my own shirt for it!
After doing a video testing different external GPUs on a Raspberry Pi last week, I realized two things:
To the second point, about every fifth comment was telling me to cross-compile Linux on a faster machine instead of doing it on the Pi itself. For example:
And on the Pi Forums, it seems like nobody worth their salt compiles the kernel on the Pi either, so I figured—since I'm probably going to have to do it again another thousand times in my life—I might as well put together a guide for how to do it on a Mac.
Over the weekend, Nvidia confirmed it would purchase ARM from Softbank for $40 billion.
Now, what is ARM, why is Nvidia buying it, and what does any of this have to do with the Raspberry Pi?
Well, let's start with ARM.
This blog post also has a video version to go along with it.
ARM can refer to a number of things, but let's start by talking about the company, Arm Holdings. They have lineage dating back to Acorn computers, a British computer manufacturer founded in the late 1970s that designed the first 'Acorn RISC Machine architecture' chips, AKA 'ARM'.
