Raspberry Pi A+ Details Leaked

mikejuk writes Despite trying to keep it secret, a major Raspberry Pi retailer has published some details of the upcoming model A+ Raspberry Pi thanks to a product page that went live early. The board layout looks different and is much smaller than the model A or B+. Judging from the photograph, the A+ board encompasses the four standard mounting holes, which makes it approximately 56x65mm — the model B+ is 56x85mm.

The key improvement is the new 40-pin GPIO socket, which makes the model A+ fully compatible with the HAT expansion standard. This means that any new HAT expansion cards should now work with the A+. It also has what's likely a connector for the yet-unreleased Raspberry Pi touchscreen. Another welcome change is the micro SD slot. One downside of the A+ is that it still has only a single USB 2 connector.

Comments

Re:Will it have the same garbage CPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is wrong with people who think that difference in clock speed over a couple of years is worth anything? The earth is millions of years old. If your imagination fails to think of something interesting to do with well-documented, well-supported technology because it's not precisely what the latest fashion demands, your contribution will be worthless.

Re:Raspi Ripoff

[CaptainOfSpray]

Name those boards, or didn't happen.

Re:Will it have the same garbage CPU?

[SuricouRaven]

It's also about being cheap. The Pi was expressly designed for use as an educational platform for use in schools. Children break everything, so the pi needs to be cheap enough that a school can keep replacing all the ones that get snapped/squished/thrown/scratched/smashed.

Re:Will it have the same garbage CPU?

[f3rret]

Well supported? What? Seriously, what are you talking about? A bunch of random idiots on some forum that don't know jack shit about the hardware or the software does not make it well supported.

Just stop trying to pretend the Pi is awesome. It was an awesome idea before it came out, everything since then has been horrible. Production delays, lack of supply (Seriously, how the fuck can you not meet demand for years on end), bad hardware design, closed source GPU blobs that only work on specific linux distros and NOTHING ELSE.

Its crap. Wake up and smell the shit on your nose.

So cus' the thing doesn't do exactly what you want, it's bad?

It's not the holy grail of anything, but it's available and it does its just just fine.

Re:Will it have the same garbage CPU?

[TheRaven64]

There's a lot of overlap between those constraints. Cheap doesn't just mean cheap to buy, it means cheap to replace. And that means that when you break one, if the exact model doesn't exist anymore then you need to be able to run everything that was working on the old one on a newer model. The advantage of the RPi over more powerful ARM boards is that it comes with that guarantee - the A+ will run everything (including the same OS image) as the A and B.

The hypothetical 700MHz vs 1GHz issue that the grandparent talks about isn't that much of a problem. More importantly, a new SoC would likely be dual (or quad or octo) core and would be ARMv7, not ARMv6. That's a big change. I expect that the RPi will skip ARMv7 entirely and that eventually there will be an ARMv8 model (possible ARMv8.1 / ARMv8.2), but the jump to 64-bit gives a good excuse for needing a new OS image.

Disclaimer: I work a couple of floors below several of the RPi Foundation, but the only thing that they've told me about their future plans is that they have some. Everything in this post is uninformed guesswork.

FTFY

[kenh]

"One downside of the A+ is that it still has only a single USB 2 connector."

"One downside of the A+ is that it still has fewer features than the B+ version."

Re:Will it have the same garbage CPU?

[mnmn]

It is garbage because a very closed CPU is used as an educational platform without datasheet availability.

This Broadcom SOC is great for mass-produced routers, bad for sharing with people trying to learn how Linux boots, learning assembly and possibly advancing to their own RTOS. I'm aware of the measly peripheral datasheet sections that are available online, but for Atmel and NXP chips one has to read a LOT more to make basic hardware level programs (how are the VICs nested, timing and boot issues/settings, other exceptions made by Broadcom i their ARM11 implementation etc).

Consistency is unimportant if youre giving people a board with the OS pre-installed, the kernel can handle different CPUs while users use different programs. But if you want to learn a bit more and go lower level (for example from Arduino), you're screwed by Broadcom SOC's severe lack of documentation. And forget about learning to code for the GPU.