Vulkan is coming to Raspberry Pi: first triangle
Following on from our recent announcement that Raspberry Pi 4 is OpenGL ES 3.1 conformant, we have some more news to share on the graphics front. We have started work on a much requested feature: an open-source Vulkan driver!
Standards body Khronos describes Vulkan as "a new generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs". The Vulkan API has been designed to better accommodate modern GPUs and address common performance bottlenecks in OpenGL, providing graphics developers with new means to squeeze the best performance out of the hardware.
Be warned that the effort could take months or even years.
Also at Phoronix.
Related Stories
A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35
In two days' time, it will be our eighth birthday (or our second, depending on your point of view). Many of you set your alarms and got up early on the morning of 29 February 2012, to order your Raspberry Pi from our newly minted licensee partners, RS Components and Premier Farnell. In the years since, we've sold over 30 million Raspberry Pi computers; we've seen our products used in an incredible range of applications all over the world (and occasionally off it); and we've found our own place in a community of makers, hobbyists, engineers and educators who are changing the world, one project, or one student, at a time.
[...] Which brings us to today's announcement. The fall in RAM prices over the last year has allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 to $35. Effective immediately, you will be able to buy a no-compromises desktop PC for the same price as Raspberry Pi 1 in 2012. [...] And of course, thanks to inflation, $35 in 2012 is equivalent to nearly $40 today. So effectively you're getting all these improvements, and a $5 price cut.
[...] In line with our commitment to long-term support, the 1GB product will remain available to industrial and commercial customers, at a list price of $35. As there is no price advantage over the 2GB product, we expect most users to opt for the larger-memory variant. [...] The 4GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 will remain on sale, priced at $55.
In addition to falling RAM prices (which will hopefully continue to fall in the future), there is likely an oversupply of the 2 GB model as the 4 GB model proved to be the most popular.
Also at TechCrunch, Tom's Hardware, PCWorld, and Hackaday.
The USB Type-C resistor issue has been fixed by the latest revision of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B hardware, which is confirmed to be out in the wild. The issue prevented some USB-C power supplies from working with Pi4B:
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new Raspberry Pi 4 model with 8 GB of RAM:
Now, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has upped the ante by releasing a Raspberry Pi 4 B with a generous 8GB of RAM. Launching today for $75, the Raspberry Pi 4 B (8GB) is identical to other Raspberry Pi 4 B models in every way, except for its RAM capacity. So what do you do with all that memory, and is spending $20 more than the price of the $55 4GB model worth it?
The short answer is that, right now, the 8GB capacity makes the most sense for users with very specialized needs: running data-intensive server loads or using virtual machines. As our tests show, it's pretty difficult to use more than 4GB of RAM on Raspberry Pi, even if you're a heavy multitasker.
A beta version of a 64-bit Raspbian OS, which is being renamed to "Raspberry Pi OS", is available. The existing 32-bit Raspbian can use all the RAM, but with a limit of up to 3 GB per process.
Some changes have been made to the board:
The back of the board adds silkscreen for certifications, as well as existing modifications for Raspberry Pi 4 Rev 1.2 to avoid damaging the board when inserting a MicroSD card. But the top of the board has more modification around the USB-C port, USB Type-A ports, and a chip between the VLI PCIe to USB chip and AV jack is just gone. So it's possible further USB-C issues have been fixed, and some improvements have been made to USB host ports maybe with regards to powering up external hard drives.
[Update from Eben Upton about hardware changes:
These are the regulator changes I mention in the post. The disappeared chip near the USB connector is the old regulator. The new stuff near the USB-C is the new regulator. The input clamp component has moved across to the USB area to make room.
Several iterations of the Raspberry Pi 4's firmware have reduced power consumption and heat. A beta-level firmware update from earlier in the week added USB boot support.
Vulkan update: we're conformant!
In June we released the source code for our prototype driver, and last month we announced that the driver had been successfully merged to Mesa upstream.
Today we have some very exciting news to share: as of 24 November the V3DV Vulkan Mesa driver for Raspberry Pi 4 has demonstrated Vulkan 1.0 conformance.
Khronos describes the conformance process as a way to ensure that its standards are consistently implemented by multiple vendors, so as to create a reliable platform for application developers. For each standard, Khronos provides a large conformance test suite (CTS) that implementations must pass successfully to be declared conformant; in the case of Vulkan 1.0, the CTS contains over 100,000 tests.
Vulkan 1.0 conformance is a major milestone in bringing Vulkan to Raspberry Pi, but it isn't the end of the journey. Our team continues to work on all fronts to expand the Vulkan feature set, improve performance, and fix bugs. So stay tuned for future Vulkan updates!
Also at CNX Software.
See also: Raspberry Pi's V3DV Vulkan Driver Now Supports Wayland
Raspberry Pi V3DV Is Officially Vulkan Conformant, Lavapipe Also Nearing 1.0 Conformance
Previously: Raspberry Pi Foundation Begins Working on Vulkan Driver
Raspberry Pi 4 Gets 8 GB RAM Model, Also 64-bit OS and USB Boot (Both in Beta)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday February 03 2020, @08:25PM (7 children)
Vulkan is barely distinct from openGL in implementation, and I don't know why they didn't just do openGL 5.0, and instead did this weird half-fork thing.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday February 03 2020, @08:57PM (5 children)
You kidding? Vulkan works in totally different way than OpenGL in pretty much all respects. Vulkan's working title was GL Next though. Good thing they gave it distinct name since otherwise it would be goddamn confusing!
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday February 03 2020, @09:08PM (4 children)
It's like the exact same interfaces and APIs though. I guess I'm complaining about a sports car having a different name from a sedan when they have the same chassis, but different engines. But it still feels wrong.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday February 03 2020, @10:04PM (2 children)
Just how are they same? Not only all functions are named different, they also work in different way. OpenGL keeps pretty much everything in global state while vulkan is object-oriented api with no global state.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday February 03 2020, @10:21PM (1 child)
I guess that's fair and I think I should concede to overall point but "different names" is a bit of a stretch, it's often just like vKCreateBuffer vs glCreateBuffer.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Tuesday February 04 2020, @08:03AM
Those uses of word Buffer refers to totally different usage patterns in both apis. And most cases of words shared between api names come from 3d rendering math/gpu programming concepts. So using this logic you could conclude that direct3d is a variant of opengl/vulkan too.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 04 2020, @02:51AM
Yeah, it was just a Falcon with a 302
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday February 03 2020, @09:23PM
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vc4-and-v3d-opengl-drivers-for-raspberry-pi-an-update/ [raspberrypi.org]
Not sure what version of Vulkan is targeted (1.0/1.1/whatever).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04 2020, @12:00AM (4 children)
Can they fix the hardware issues first?
I'd rather they fix the passive cooling issues with the RPi4 that cause the thermal throttling during multi-core tasks and the damn non-standard USB-C cable crap.
I'm really not trying to be to be a Negative Nancy, and I really DO like these SBCs. Things were really going so well each new generation of the boards, until version 4.
Hopefully they will fix these things in the next board release, but in the meantime, I really struggle to have any excitement over this news like I would have in the past.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday February 04 2020, @12:26AM (2 children)
Temperatures are lowered with the latest firmware updates. I usually run less than 50°C in a FLIRC case, so no throttling in sight. Plastic case with no cooling? Yes: [jeffgeerling.com]
Cooling Option / Min Temp (°C) / Max temp (°C) / CPU throttled?
Pi in official case (no fan) / 51 / 82 / YES
after fw update / 43 / 76 / NO
"USB-C cable crap" affects almost nobody [tomshardware.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Tuesday February 04 2020, @04:21PM (1 child)
Can firmware really do that? It sounds more like they just throttled back the board overall. I cannot imagine a firmware update that somehow caused a 0 fan device to passively cool faster or run all code more efficiently so as to create less waste heat.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 04 2020, @04:46PM
It looks like performance has stayed the same or improved by throttling less during stress tests.
Here, you can watch them go through every update (never seen this blog post, it's great):
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/thermal-testing-raspberry-pi-4/ [raspberrypi.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 04 2020, @02:45AM
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=256646&start=250 [raspberrypi.org]
It's rumored that the 1.2 hardware revision fixes the USB-C issue, but there's no official confirmation of that and it could be difficult to find the latest revision without running code on it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]