8GB Raspberry and 64bit.

[Brian Beuken]

wow....

The 64bit is big, though it will create a few teething issues, where a lot of software will stop working, and some need to redo some coding, but it wil make the Pi faster.

But 8Gb... I never imagined they'd bring out an SBC with 8GB....I can't get my head around that..brilliant news.

[Brian Beuken]

After a bit of a ponder though, I can't quite get my head around why this system exists, it pushes the price up to $75 (85euros) and its hard to see a general use case that would benefit from it.
I tried to ask about this on a facebook group and got shot down for being negative, like the guy in an apple launch asking why does it cost so much....

The general argument is loading more tasks...ok...but even a 2GB system does not come close to filling its memory with its OS and a few apps running... and if you're going to fill 8GB of memory with apps....you can bet your CPU is going to really struggle to process that many things at one time...so things will really start to slow down.
I've not even come close to hitting a memory limit on my 4GB system with dozens of apps running including my own quad core and graphic tests, and yes it does slow down on some of them, depending on their background running status.

So its kinda overkill, apart from a few specialist cases, like servers and maybe deep learning data bases.....

strange...I don't know what the point of this is.

[jomoengineer]

Yeah, it looks the only reason for the 8Gb is so it run a 64-bit OS to map all 8Gb into address space of a single process, but that is not fully baked. Also, it looks like they had a limitation previously due to a lack of an 8GB LPDDR4 package.

With the 64-Bit Os, there are some graphic changes though:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt...7&t=275370

Known issues
1) There is no hardware video acceleration in VLC or Chromium
2) libraspberrypi0, libraspberrypi-dev and libraspberrypi-doc have been moved out of /opt/vc/* and into /usr/* instead (making it more standard). Any code built against these libraries will require changing to refer to a more standard location (/usr/lib/ rather than /opt/vc/lib)
3) Due to 2) Many packages that expect libGLESv2.so libEGL etc will require rebuilding


I can wait.