SBC / Low Power boards general - Raspberry Pi and what not

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Susanna said:
If I ever thought the 5W GPU in my phone was missing something, it was definitely raytracing.
The AI stuff sounds pretty good though. Should make voice recognition much snappier.
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Technically, low levels of modern hardware-based gaytracing have been in phones at least since the Samsung Exynos 2200 with AMD RDNA2 graphics in 2022. Raytracing will eventually (mid-2030s?) move from a layer that complements rasterization to full/mandatory. What's possible with big discrete GPUs at 4K could scale down to e.g. 1080p at 5W after a couple of node shrinks. For actually seeing the graphics, you could dock your phone to a display, or use a different ARM-equipped device like a gaming handheld. Devices with Qualcomm's "Snapdragon G" gaming SoCs can actually use up to 18 Watts, and all of the Qualcomm cores are highly derivative of ARM's designs AFAIK. Phones can do upscaling as well, with ARM's "Accuracy Super Resolution" being based on FSR2. I think there are better options now.

No, what caught my attention were those terrible names. Lumex? C1-Ultra/Premium/Pro/Nano??? I was shooked that these were what they chose to replace the Cortex names.
 
Yuck, Qualcomm and Samsung phones.
I’ll bow out, ”gaming phones” is not a concept I understand, nor is it one I want to understand. I’ll stick with my iPhone.
 
Susanna said:
Yuck, Qualcomm and Samsung phones.
I’ll bow out, ”gaming phones” is not a concept I understand, nor is it one I want to understand. I’ll stick with my iPhone.
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Apple introduces iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus
The 5-core GPU is up to 40 percent faster and 35 percent more efficient than A16 Bionic, putting a powerful gaming device in users’ pockets. Now with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, games on iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus more accurately represent the behavior of light with up to 5x higher frame rates than with software-based ray tracing. Both models support the AAA games previously only available on iPhone 15 Pro, as well as new titles like Honor of Kings: World with an ultra graphics mode optimized for the iPhone 16 lineup, coming next year.
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I know, my iPad has raytracing also, it’s just not a feature I see any value in. When I play games on my phone it’s either puzzles, solitaire, or old GBA games in an emulator. I have used Steam streaming to play proper PC games, but that hardly counts.
 
Battlefield42 said:
Why is raytracing so important anyway? Why should i care?
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It's a different way of rendering graphics and you need it to play DOOM: The Dark Ages... on an emulator on your phone.

DOOM: The Dark Ages uses ray tracing to enhance gameplay, not just visuals
"We also took the idea of ray tracing, not only to use it for visuals but also gameplay," Director of Engine Technology at id Software, Billy Khan, explains. "We can leverage it for things we haven't been able to do in the past, which is giving accurate hit detection. [In DOOM: The Dark Ages], we have complex materials, shaders, and surfaces."

"So when you fire your weapon, the hit detection would be able to tell if you're hitting a pixel that is leather sitting next to a pixel that is metal," Billy continues. "Before ray tracing, we couldn't distinguish between two pixels very easily, and we would pick one or the other because the materials were too complex. Ray tracing can do this on a per-pixel basis and showcase if you're hitting metal or even something that's fur. It makes the game more immersive, and you get that direct feedback as the player."
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I love that DOOM: The Dark Ages requires ray tracing, and I hope more games follow
Speaking in an interview with the tech experts at Digital Foundry, id Software director of engine technology Billy Khan talked about how, without building the game around ray tracing, it would've taken years longer for id Software to craft DOOM: The Dark Ages.

According to Khan, switching to ray tracing meant no longer having to bake the lighting while working on the game, saving countless hours of work for the development team and allowing changes to be made on the fly without issues.

"Without ray tracing and with the same design goals, we would have had to elongate the time by a magnitude of years, because we wouldn't have the ability to create the same type of content," Khan says.
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Raspberry Pi: The ultimate all-in-one PC: Raspberry Pi 500+ on sale now at $200 (archive)
Raspberry Pi 500+ boasts a high-quality mechanical keyboard with removable keycaps and individually addressable RGB LEDs, an internal M.2 socket pre-fitted with a 256GB Raspberry Pi SSD, and 16GB of RAM. Read on for the full story, or skip straight to the Raspberry Pi 500+ product page to order yours.
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Pi 500 Gaymer Edition.

The regular Raspberry Pi 500 is $90. This is another $110 to transform it into a mechanical keyboard with a few more keys (each using a "Gateron KS-33 Blue switch with a custom RAL 7001 Silver Grey stem"), individual LGBT lighting for each key, the missing M.2 socket is added in and populated with a 256 GB SSD, and the RAM is doubled from 8 GB. It has an internal Raspberry Pi RP2040 to handle the lighting.

Pi 5's 8 GB to 16 GB step is officially +$40. The SSD is about a $10-20 value. So about +$50-60 for the fancier keyboard.


 
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I'm old and remember when Raspberry Pis were these magical devices all the boffins were using to power all their tech. And now it's just kind of there. It's still great for what it is but I see less people use it just because it's the Raspberry Pi. I like the idea of making computer and programing kits with it to get kids into programming though. That's a great idea.
 
Steinercard said:
I'm old and remember when Raspberry Pis were these magical devices all the boffins were using to power all their tech. And now it's just kind of there. It's still great for what it is but I see less people use it just because it's the Raspberry Pi. I like the idea of making computer and programing kits with it to get kids into programming though. That's a great idea.
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Many Boffins died to bring us 16 GB RAM and RGB in a Raspberry Pi.
 
Micro Center has not offered the Pi 500+ for sale yet, but they have a placeholder product page listing it $20 under MSRP. If that is what they end up selling it for, and you manage to pick up someone's inevitable returned unit as open box, it might be had as low as $144.
 
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