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Raspberry Pi Hits the 2 Million Mark
The Raspberry Pi project that we've been fans of for quite a while now has hit a new milestone: Today, they announced that as of the last week in October, the project has sold more than two million boards. Raspberry Pi is anything but alone in the tiny, hackable computer world (all kinds of other options, from Arduino to the x86-based Minnowboard, are out there, and all have their selling points), but the low price, open-source emphasis, and focus on education have all helped the Pi catch on. If yours is one of these 2 million, what are you using it for? (And if you favor some other small system for your own experiments, what factors matter?)
I have a few different arm boards including two raspberry pi boards. Power consumption / power efficiency is NOT a selling point of the pi, if comparing to other arm boards. The pi has no low power states, it is full power all the time. The pi also uses linear voltage regulators, so very inefficient.
My original model panda board has 1G ram, is several times faster than the pi, and uses half the power most of the time, and has the same peak power.
My odroid U2 is at least 10 times faster than the pi, has 2G ram, and uses about the same power (or a little less) most of the time (but it has crazy high peak power if running at 100%cpu with a massive heatsink). If you pull the heatsink, it thermal throttles to still way faster than a pi, and keeps the peak power consumption pretty close to the pi.
I don't have a beagle bone black, but I would suspect it is lower power consumption than a pi.
The selling point for the pi is the community around it is _much_ larger than any of these other SBCs.
While TI documents most of the am3359 SOC it does not provide any documentation for the Imagination Technologies PowerVR GPU core which is proprietary. To the OP, as far as I know there are no non-proprietary GPUs (more or less beefy) on any ARM SOC so good luck on finding one without binary blobs.