50 Cool Raspberry Pi Projects

 

50 Cool Raspberry Pi Projects for December 2020

Anatol Locker
1 day ago

Looking for new applications for your Raspberry Pi 4? Check our list of 50 cool Raspberry Pi projects which are actually useful and fun.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is the ideal “brain” for a multitude of DIY projects. Reliable, hackable, open-source and energy-efficient, this bare board is a versatile tool.

Don’t Miss

30 Great Raspberry Pi 3D Printer Projects

Offering a little extra oompf of computing power over its predecessors, the Raspberry Pi 4 is perfectly capable as a 4K media center or desktop computer, but it doesn’t stop there. Here are 50 cool Raspberry Pi projects to make the most of this remarkable little board.

If you own a 3D printer, we’ve got even more Raspberry Pi projects that you might want to take a look at.

 

Intel Quick Sync Video

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search

Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. Quick Sync was introduced with the Sandy Bridge CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011 and has been found on the die of Intel CPUs ever since.

The name "Quick Sync" refers to the use case of quickly transcoding ("converting") a video from, for example, a DVD or Blu-ray Disc to a format appropriate to, for example, a smartphone. This becomes critically important in the professional video workplace, in which source material may have been shot in any number of video formats, all of which must be brought into a common format (commonly H.264) for inter-cutting.

Unlike video encoding on a CPU or a general-purpose GPU, Quick Sync is a dedicated hardware core on the processor die. This allows for much more power-efficient video processing.

Hardware decoding and encoding[edit]

Support for Quick Sync hardware accelerated decoding of H.264, MPEG-2, and VC-1 video is widely available. One common way to gain access to the technology on Microsoft Windows is by use of the free ffdshow filter. Some other free software like VLC media player (since version 2.1.0 "Rincewind") supports Quick Sync as well. Many commercial applications also benefit from the technology today, including CyberLink PowerDVD, CyberLink PowerDirector and MacroMotion Bogart "gold" edition.

According to the ffdshow documentation, Quick Sync has very low CPU utilization while being about twice as fast as libavcodec.^[23]

Support for hardware-assisted media encoding tailored for Quick Sync is widely available. Examples of such software with Quick Sync support during encoding processes are Emby Media Server,^[24] Plex Media Server,^[25] Badaboom Media Converter, CyberLink MediaShow, CyberLink MediaEspresso, ArcSoft MediaConverter, MAGIX Video Pro X, Pinnacle Studio (since version 18), Roxio Toast, Roxio Creator, XSplit Broadcaster,^[26] XSplit Gamecaster^[27] (all commercial) and projects like HandBrake,^[28][29] Open Broadcaster Software^[30] or applications for operation with a video content entering in Adobe CC2018.

The following table shows fixed-function encode/decode support for various Intel platforms:^[31][32]

Fixed-function Quick Sync Video format support

	Cantiga	Clarkdale / Arrandale	Sandy Bridge	Ivy Bridge / Haswell	Broadwell	Braswell / Cherry Trail	Skylake	Apollo Lake[33]	Kaby Lake / Gemini Lake[34] / Coffee Lake[35] / Comet Lake	Ice Lake[36]	Tiger Lake / Rocket Lake[37]
MPEG-2	Decode only	Decode only	Decode only	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
AVC	No	Decode only	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
VC-1	No	No	Decode only	Decode only	Decode only	Decode only	Decode only	Decode only	Decode only	Decode only	Decode only
JPEG	No	No	No	Decode only	Decode only	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
VP8	No	No	No	No	Decode only	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
HEVC	No	No	No	No	No	Decode only	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
HEVC 10-bit	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Decode only (8K)	Yes[38]	Yes	Yes
HEVC 12-bit	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Decode only
VP9	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Decode only (4K)	Partial (Encoding on Linux only)[39]	Yes	Yes
VP9 10-bit	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Decode only	Yes[40]	Yes
VP9 12-bit	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Decode only
AV1	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No[41]	Decode only
AV1 10-bit	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Decode only
AV1 12-bit	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
EVC	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
VVC	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No

Certain low-end and high-end parts (including multi-socket Xeons and some Extreme Edition CPUs expected to be used with a dedicated GPU) do not contain the hardware core to support Quick Sync.

GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy: Graphics Cards Ranked

By Jarred Walton a month ago

We've run hundreds of GPU benchmarks on all the current Nvidia and AMD graphics cards and ranked them in our comprehensive hierarchy.

 
 
 
 

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Our GPU benchmarks performance hierarchy ranks all the current and previous generation graphics cards, including all of the best graphics cards, in terms of performance. Whether it's playing games or doing high-end creative work like 4K video editing, your graphics card typically plays the biggest role in determining performance, and even the best gaming CPUs take a second role.

Note that the table below is based solely on the scores from performance-based GPU benchmarks. We have a separate article that lists the best graphics cards, based on all factors, including price, graphics card power consumption, and overall efficiency. If you're shopping around and want to know whether an AMD RX 5600 XT is faster than an Nvidia GTX 1660 Super, and by how much, you've come to the right place.

The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review

3700X and 3900X Raising The Bar

by Andrei Frumusanu & Gavin Bonshor on July 7, 2019 9:00 AM EST

• Posted in
• CPUs
• Gaming
• AMD
• Zen
• 7nm
• Ryzen
• Ryzen 7
• Zen 2
• Ryzen 3000
• Ryzen 3rd Gen
• Ryzen 9
• 12-core
• Ryzen 3700X
• Ryzen 3900X

Power Consumption & Overclocking

Power consumption of the new Ryzen 3900X and 3700X are of particular interest because it’s a very key aspect of the new generation chipsets, and AMD promises some extremely large improvements thanks to the new 7nm process node as well as the optimised chiplet design.

When comparing the single-chiplet Ryzen 3700X to the previous generation Ryzen 2700X, we’re seeing quite some dramatic differences in core power consumption. In particular power consumption at each chip’s respective peak frequency is notably different: Although the new 3700X has a 100MHz higher clock speed and thus is further up the exponential power curve, it manages to showcase 32% lower absolute power than the 2700X.

We have to remember that we’re talking about overall absolute power, and not efficiency of the chip. When taking actual performance into account through the higher clock as well as Zen2’s increased performance per clock, the Performance/W figures for the new 3700X should be significantly higher than its predecessor.

What is curious about the new chip is just how closely it follows its power limitations. The new boosting algorithm on the Ryzen 3 series is a particularly “opportunistic” one that will go as high in frequencies as it can go within its constraints, no matter the amount of CPU cores.