[Jeff Geerling] saw the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and its uncovered PCI-Express 1x link, and just normally wondered whether or not he could plug a GPU into that slot and get it to get the job done. It didn’t. There were being a handful of reasons why, this sort of as the confined Base Deal with Register place, and motorists that just weren’t created for ARM hardware. A bit of help from the Raspberry Pi software engineers and other Linux kernel hackers and these concerns were being preset, albeit with a huge hurdle in the CPU. The Broadcom chip in the Pi 4, the BCM2711, has a broken PCIe implementation.
There has lastly been a breakthrough — Thanks to the committed neighborhood that has sprung up about this subject matter, a set of kernel patches control to get the job done about the hardware troubles. It’s now possible to operate a Radeon Hd 5000/6000/7000 card on the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module. There are nevertheless glitches, and the Kernel patches to make this work will very likely in no way land upstream. That explained, It is probable to run a desktop ecosystem on the Radeon GPU on a Pi, and even a handful of straightforward benchmarks. The results… aren’t especially inspiring, but that was not definitely ever the place. You might be asking what actual-world use is for a complete-size GPU on the Pi. Certain, possibly crypto-mining or emulation, or getting ready to operate a lot more monitors for digital signage. Additional than that, it could aid make certain the up coming Pi has a doing the job PCIe implementation. But like numerous things we address below, the actual motive is that it’s a problem that a team of fans could not go away on your own.
