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Comment by prox | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if a Raspberry GPU board (low cost graphics performance) is possible. For light Blender work and maybe simple games.

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It’s better even in GPU perf/$ to buy a Jetson Nano 2GB, the RPi4 GPU is really small (and not that well featured).

The Jetson Nano uses a very similar SoC to the Nintendo Switch, so you can expect similar performance.

It uses half a switch SoC GPU wise

All versions? Would be cool to use a hacked switch running linux instead of Jetson if the performance was that much better.

921.6MHz is the GPU clock on Jetson Nano (at MAXN).

For the Switch:

> The GPU cores are clocked at 768 MHz when the device is docked, and in handheld mode, fluctuating between the following speeds: 307.2 MHz, 384 MHz, and 460 MHz

But you can only run one flavor of Linux on it, since NVidia keeps the specs closed.

Today on the Jetson Nanos, you can just use the Fedora stock image. (flashed to a microSD card)

It’s much better than what it was before. nouveau works ootb, including reclocking too.

It’s also to be noted that all Tegras have an open-source kernel mode GPU driver (nvgpu) even when using the proprietary stack. However, that driver isn’t in an ideal state today.

Can you use stock Ubuntu?

The one nvidia provides is not stock.

FP32 GFLOPS, ballparks from random sources:

- this: 24

- Ryzen 5600g: 200(CPU)

- Jetson nano: 235

- GeForce GT1030: 1127

- Ryzen 3rd IGP: 2100

- Apple M1X: 5200

- Apple M1 Pro: 10400

- RTX3080: 35580

1030 can be had for $110 even at this height of GPU shortages, not that much more than a Nano. hmm

But a GT1030 can’t be hooked up to a small board like Raspberry or even the Nano, right?

You can hook up a desktop graphics card to Raspberry Pi 4 compute board. It's got 2 lanes of PCIe gen 2. Its very unlikely you can get drivers working with it though.

That’s a shame!

Wow that’s an interesting device! Thanks!

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