Experimentation with the quad core Raspberry Pi

[Joost Buijs]

I've been waiting for months to get the Dragonboard that I ordered.
Last month the company told me that there are problems with FCC regulations and that it is going to take even longer.
So I decided to cancel my order.

Now I found this board:

http://www.up-board.org/

This looks very promising, and it is developed in my country which makes it a lot easier for me to get.
It also has a 1G ethernet connection which the Dragonboard doesn't have.

[sje]

Now I found this board:

http://www.up-board.org/

This looks very promising, and it is developed in my country which makes it a lot easier for me to get.
It also has a 1G ethernet connection which the Dragonboard doesn't have.

Quad core, 64 bit CPU. Relatively slow though, optimized for cost and power consumption. It could work well if most of an application can fit inside the 32 KiB / 24 KiB L1 caches. A definite candidate for use in a cluster.

[bnemias]

The lack of an Ethernet port can be resolved with a USB->Ethernet adapter -- at extra cost. But at US$70, the Qualcomm board already has enough extra cost.

Tempting. Lack of ethernet is quite irritating. However it does come with 8G eMMC and a P/S. I'd like to replace my old kirkwood home server with something like this, but lacking ethernet... i dunno. But I suspect I could run zerowin (FICS) on just one core and it'd be a lot stronger.

I didn't see any cases for it. That's a must if I'm going to convert it into a server.

I did find a suitable upgrade along these lines. I went with an Orange Pi Plus. I spent $51 for the device + case + power supply. It's hard to recommend the case I bought, and I actually had suitable P/S from other routers handy, so you can actually get this shipped for $42 without that stuff.

Anyway, it has 8GB emmc, gigabit ethernet and a SATA port. Though the latter two are tied to USB, so done on the cheap. I basically like it, only it is not going to work well for a chess engine without additional steps to handle thermal issues. Adding a heatsink, I can operate 2 cores at 100% without issue. Beyond that, you'll actually need either a massive custom heatsink, or a fan. Since my intent is to run an engine on one core only, I'm set with just a heatsink.

It's more for tinkerers than the Raspberry PI though. Getting all the devices working requires taking extra steps during setup in order to run a custom kernel with all the firmwares loading. Not hard really, but extra steps that absolutely are needed because no d/l images contain the most updated drivers/kernel.

There are other Orange Pi alternatives. there is a the PC version which lacks emmc, gigabit ethernet, and SATA. It's $19 shipped, and not a horrible choice. I wanted emmc instead of the much slower micro-SD card for various reasons, thus the Plus version. the loads on mine were huge until transferring O/S to emmc. The CPUs weren't pegged, but I guess the SD latency made the IO peg all the load numbers. Not sure if this is a problem, but it makes it hard to identify a pegged CPU just by looking at the load averages.

[Kempelen]

I also own a Raspberry Pi 2. It is great to learn Linux and testing new things. I have been able to compile my engine and now I have icsdrone, so Rodin is playing at FICS from the PI.

What it is great also is Picochess. I can play my engine in my DGT Board, although the software has a few bugs I hope they will be fixed soon.

I am also thinking in new uses. Does someone have been able to mount a reasonable engine testing environment?. If one buy three or four raspberrys, there are lot of cores to play tournaments. A cheap testing cluster. What is your opinion? I know is not a great computer, but are the same specs for all engines.

Regards

[Joost Buijs]

For a bitboard oriented engine devices based on a Cortex A7 are performing rather poor, that's why I'm looking for something with a 64 bit CPU.

With my engine I get hardly 500 kn/sec. on a Raspberry PI 2B.
On one of these new (2 Watt) Z8700 Atoms it is doing around 2 mn/sec.

[bnemias]

On one of these new (2 Watt) Z8700 Atoms it is doing around 2 mn/sec.

This is typical Intel BS. I don't dispute your NPS, but if you think it's happening at 2 Watts, you should sue for misrepresentation.

Intel invented metrics aside (SDP), I'll admit newer atoms are appealing on some level. They aren't cheap though. That chip alone costs the same as a RPI today, probably in lots of 1000 though. I didn't see any available on Newegg, but the cheapest device with one was an out of stock item for 300 US. There were maybe 10 items and after the out of stock one, the next cheapest was 600 US. Big difference.