I am just curious. The A-04 and A-06 are sold out, but the CM4 is not.
In my book, the CM4 is way more powerful.
Am I wrong? Or what are the disadvantages of the CM4? Reduced battery life? Heat?
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Iām not sure, but I think the A06 is the most powerful. I got it to start with (on Devterm). The CM4 is more compatible in terms of software though, and it can have up to 8GB of RAM, unlike the others which max out at 4GB.
With the A06 and A04 you have various choices on OS to run, but they all have strengths and weaknesses. A04 in particular has unfixed issues like no HDMI output and maybe other things. CM4 seems more stable and generally more compatible with everything including the Devterm hardware. Iām assuming the same will be true for uConsole, but we wonāt know until it ships and people start testing it.
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Good topic! I have the A-06 devterm and purchased the A-06 uConsole - I have been able to load all software I wish but in some cases I had to load from source and compile. the only thing I could not do is get VNC server to work - it corrupted the OS and caused a boot to console issue. ( I am used to VNC viewer with Raspberry Pi) but Iāve used ssh insteadā¦ so I like the speed most applications including Mozilla browser have decent performance.
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I think I was wrongā¦ the A-06 and A-04 should be more powerful for emulation due to the dedicated Mali GPU.
But I guess the CM4 is the most āversatileā. Considering, all the SW support on the raspberry pi.
Is it possible to swap the Raspberry Pi compute module?
I just looked it up: cm4-product-brief.pdf (raspberrypi.com)
The CM4104000, which is included with the uConsole CM4, is a compute module without eMMC memory on board. It offers 4GB of RAM.
All compute modules feature the same form factor. So it shouldnāt be an issue to swap it for a CM4008032 with 8GB of RAM and 32GB eMMC memoryā¦ I guess.
The A-06 is basically half a Raspberry Pi 4 together with a Raspberry Pi 3 and a dedicated GPU.
The A-04 is a Raspberry Pi 3 with dedicated GPU.
Yeahā¦ I donāt knowā¦ I 'm gonna stick with the CM4 I guess. 
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Actually unless CP have shimmed the functionality in OR you have a carrier board you canāt just use a CM4 with onboard storage. There is discrete switch functionality you need to flash to the emmc. You first have to mount it as if if is externaly mounted storage, flash, load, install and then run the OS from onboard storage. A whole lot easier for CP to use SD mounted storage.
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Yep, you can swap between any of the CM4s. Although you cannot use the SD card if you get one with MMC. And you also cannot flash the OS to the MMC without extra hardware (put the CM4 in the other hardware, flash it, then move to Devterm/uConsole). Some have used the MMC version which is faster for storage read/write, but I went with the no MMC version because I wanted to be able to use it without extra steps and I wanted to be able to use the SD card.
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There are also known (and currently unfixed) issues with the A04, for sure. The HDMI out exists but has never worked. I think there were other issues too, but youād have to search the forums. The A06 HDMI out actually works. Both A06 and A04 cannot properly go into a āsleepā mode and resume from that. You basically have to shutdown, because although it can go unto sleep, it canāt resume. Sounded like some progress had been made to fix that on the A06, but itās not made available yet. Some of the official Clockwork Pi OS images for A04 and A06 have had issues as well, like the printer not working without some extra fixes, etc. There were also issues with upgrading armbian and breakage of apt repositories, but I think that has been fixed on the A0x devices by now, at least with the latest OS versions.
Overall, the CM4 version seems to support all the functionality of the device, and requires less of these fixes. Itās probably also likely to have more long term OS support as well, since it can run anything other CM4 devices can run. The only thing that might require a bit of extra attention in the future is the printer, but Iām guessing those drivers should be able to be added on to future OS versions and still work.
Incidentally, the CM3 version seems to have had fewer problems in the past as well, and probably still works fine today. Iāve never tried one though, and there donāt seem to be as many active forum participants with them, but it would probably be a solid (if not, less powerful) choice as well.
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A06 is more powerful TMK, and might be bootable with entirely free software (CM4 requires some blobs iirc)
I did the math in another thread a few months ago, but basically the CM4 with a slight overclock from 1.5ghz to 1.8ghz matches the A-06 AKA RK3399 in multicore, and slightly beats it in single core performance. Dunno about overclocking the A-06 tho. Both cores are more than powerful enough for their use cases
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In most instances, the RK3399 in the A-06 will come out on top. Not endorsing this site, but they seem to have metrics (and wrong advice, ymmv) Rockchip RK3399 vs Broadcom BCM2711 Benchmarks, Specs, Performance Comparison and Differences - GadgetVersus
As far as support, there are a number of SBCs and SoMs from a wide variety of vendors that use the RK3399.
Overall, the big.LITTLE architecture seems more suitable for devices like the uConsole.
I pre-ordered the CM-4 w/ optional WIFI+4G cellular back in October. I primarily went with that model because I want to drop a SIM card in it to use 4G internet on-the-go.
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The Raspberry Pi CM4 is slightly less powerful than the A-06 on paper, but itās a perfectly capable chip and has a larger community of developers supporting it.
Unless you know that youāll need the A-06, I would recommend the CM4.
wait times on CM4 with Newark electronics is 4/28/24! but the price is right! If I wanted to convert my Clockwork hardware to a different processor the Risc one is the only one they have āin stockā right nowā¦
I bought the A-06 model. Iām mainly going to be running Pico 8 and Tic-80.
I purchased the A06 as well - I have the DevTerm with the A06 and it runs most applications with reasonable performance - also there is an external screen issue with the A-04 processorā¦ so once I have a processor and know the work arounds Iāll stick with it - also my build notes are applicable for bothā¦
@MHam68HC11 When you say most applications run reasonably, are you talking about stuff directly from app managers (apt, snap, synaptic, etc)? Also, whatās the scope of apps you run (programing, light emulation, word processing, etc)?
Most demanding applications I run are Ham radio related - APRS, Software Defined Radio (SDR) sound card decode of ham radio signals (FLDIGI) Database server, NodeRed server, Grafana Server - also use open office applications, Visual Studio, Spyder IDE, Browsers, Email Clients ā¦ Most are installed using apt, some using snap, and rpmā¦