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New Multi-Core Raspberry Pi 2 Launches
First time accepted submitter MicroHex writes Coming in at the same $35 price-point that has come to be expected from the Raspberry Pi, it looks like the new Model 2 will be packing a quad-core ARM processor with a GB of RAM. From the article: "The Raspberry Pi Foundation is likely to provoke a global geekgasm today with the surprise release of the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: a turbocharged version of the B+ boasting a new Broadcom BCM2836 900MHz quad-core system-on-chip with 1GB of RAM – all of which will drive performance "at least 6x" that of the B+."
Why are they still shipping the same CPU core that was in the iPhone 2G? ARM is at least 3 generations ahead already. ARM11 doesn't have NEON (proper SIMD) instructions, so it's crap for multimedia processing (sure, they make it up for the usual codecs with their GPU core, but that doesn't help if you want to write your own code).
Seriously, when the Pi first came out one of my first complaints was that the CPU core was woefully outdated and I already owned several boards with much more recent ARM cores, and several years later they still haven't upgraded it? WTF? What sense does this make? Does Broadcom not have a license for more modern ARM cores? Are the licensing fees too high to ship it in a low-cost product? (Answer: no, plenty of Chinese SoC vendors are doing it). What's the issue?
Man, you guys sure do edit harshly =p I don't see a word I wrote in there.
Still the same old problems with the GPU - no available driver except some binary blob that only works on some crufty-old, broken kernel. The Raspberry Pi Foundation would do better getting the GPU supported than just bumping the CPU. Having real access to the GPU would really open up the possibilities.
In the meantime I'll stick with the Cubietruck that has multi-core, 1GHz CPUs, 2 GiB of RAM, a SATA controller and a few other nice features. Unfortunately it has an unsupported GPU too (grrr!).
900mhz is a bit under the bar considering how important single-thread perf is, and considering the massive amount of "Android sticks" these days sporting 1.4+ GHz quad cores, and it's not really helping that they are STILL using ARMv6 while "everyone else" has been on ARMv7 for two years or more, but this is nevertheless a worthy upgrade in relation to what the older models offer.
As Eben Upton himself said about it, "now it's just good".
If this fixes the disk io issues I'm buying 5. On a B+, copying data to a HDD slaved to it is painfully slow. Like 10Mb slow.
Good grief is the naming scheme tiresome.
Did anyone think about problems this goofy naming scheme causes? The ease of searching supplier's catalogs, googling, etc? Hell, just talking to another person? "Oh yeah, I've got the Pi 2 Model B plus", versus "I've got a Model D." Did anyone concern themselves with the fact that a lot of resellers may not ID the revision at all? How are you supposed to google for an issue you're having with the latest model?
Please help metamoderate.
But can it handle HEVC?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This is for embedded controllers and hobbyists. Think Lego Mindstorm projects?
FYI I ran FreeBSD/slackware on Pentium IIs 266 MHz single core just fine back in the day. This is fine for netbsd to run little databases, home media sharing, robots, and just about anything.
Not to run Chrome with +30 tabs, compile gnome, or run SystemD on. Get a real PC for that. For $35 you can make a fun tiny rack, stick them in a truck for a home made cd player, or gosh probably a million different things.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm laughing at those Windows 8 users posting here complaining that a friggin GIG of RAM isn't enough. Most rPI projects are also done on Arduinos and similar, with a 20Mhz clock and RAM measured in bytes. Typical Pi programs are hundreds of bytes. 1024 bytes is 1024 small variables; how many do you need to turn lamps on and off, or position a servo?
Running your 200 byte program on top of a Linux kernel is just a convenience. It's not made to run Microsoft Office on it all day, it's designed for reading a few switches, turning on a motor, and lighting an led - which requires about 24 bytes of RAM.
Of course some people use them as entertainment media centers. That's kind of the one oddball use that needs a thousand times the resources of most things people use their Pi for.
Isn't it amazing, that we're talking about a quad core processor with 1GB ram, AS A CHEAP EMBEDDED BOARD.
My current smartphone (wave) is a Cortex-A8 based design, and it does everything I could want and I don't need to upgrade, yet within the lifespan of the phone, a much faster chip is available for embedded use costing peanuts now.
It's quite fantastic the way progress is so fast that your complaint sounds a bit like a fashion designer complaining that people are wearing last years fashion trend!
If you consider that the current top of the heap are the 64bit K's and Snapdragon 810's (Octacore 64 bit processors), its staggering the pace of change.
Quad cores are mighty hungry and I doubt it will come with those fancy lithium ION expensive batteries on our smart phones.
This is important as these are for embedded devices
http://saveie6.com/
Yes, it's underpowered and possibly overpriced in comparison to (x, y, z,...)
But the Raspberry Pi has a large and growing ecosystem behind it -- developers (hardware and software), users, and more.
The Arduino is a similar beast -- underpowered, overpriced, and with a tremendous ecosystem, approachable and available to new classes of users.
As an example, look at what Adafruit is doing with Arduinos and the Raspberry Pi -- making them available, accessible, and useable by a wide audience, not just those tho are comfortable rebuilding kernels.
Look at other historical examples -- the underpowered 6502 (Apple ][) or that atrocity with 640k is good enough for anybody, right?
Is pasted here
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=zNxgHtdA
(Stupid lameness filter...)
It is a second rate teaching tool if it is too slow
for web surfing and can't handle Youtube.
Raspberry Pis are used primarily for very small tasks, controlling a few motors and lights in a haunted house gimmick, running cool Christmas lights, or an alarm system reading sensors once per second. A CPU capable of a BILLION operations per second is about ten thousand times more than what's needed.
Similarly, over a billion bytes of RAM. Controlling twelve zones of Christmas lights uses an array of twelve variables - 12 bytes. The program code might be another 200 bytes. So you have 1,073,741,600 bytes left over.
And millions of kiddies keeled over in excitement!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
R-Pi 2.x should be 64-bit. This is a learning platform, and the future is 64-bit arm .... NOW.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Not only that, Odroid C1 runs at 1.5 GHz quad core ARMv7, and has gigabit ethernet. RPi 2 is only 900 MHz quad core ARMv6. I'm quickly becoming a fan of HardKernel.
I once had a signature.
You're confusing low-end with outdated. An ARM Cortex-M3 or M4 board would be a low-end board suitable for tasks such as motor control, while being reasonably modern, and cheaper than the Raspberry Pi. An ARM Cortex-A5 or higher would be modern and suitable for running Linux. ARM11 isn't low-end, it's high-end and outdated.
Raspberry Pi suffers from exactly the same problem as the Arduino: both are based on an ancient, woefully outdated platform. Just because performance is "good enough" for whatever your idea of "good enough" is, doesn't mean it makes any sense whatsoever to stick to cores that are 10 years old or older. Moving up to moder modern designs give you more bang for the same buck, or less buck for the same bang. In the silicon industry it just makes no sense whatsoever to lag behind 3 generations for something like this. Newer designs are built in newer process nodes, scale to higher frequencies, and cost less to manufacture for the same performance. Being at the bleeding edge of silicon is expensive, but drop down a generation or so (relative to whatever field you're interested in) and that's the price/performance sweet spot. Using older stuff just doesn't make sense.
This keeps happening over and over and over again. When I started embedded programming, back when the PIC16C84 was released (the first microcontroller to feature EEPROM program memory, soon followed by the PIC16F84 Flash version), it stirred up a hobbyist revolution. No longer did you need expensive EPROM burners, UV erasers, and expensive UV-windowed chips with an erase cycle measured in minutes! And yet 5 years later people were still using the same damn PIC16F84, with its sole timer and just about no other features, when you could buy a PIC16F88 for 2/3 the price and get three timers, built-in analog-to-digital conversion, serial port/UART, SPI/SSP, PWM, analog comparator, built-in 8MHz oscillator, more RAM and Flash, ... Why? Because PIC16F84 was popular and people were scared to use anything else, even if it is almost a drop-in replacement.
Then the Arduino happened, and even more people people joined what became called the maker movement. And us longtime PIC users rolled our eyes because we'd been doing it for years and we didn't need no steenking breakout boards for a trivial 8-bit chip, but hey, C compilers for PICs sucked, and AVR was a better architecture anyway, and so Arduino deservedly became popular. But then the silliness started to set in again: ARM came up with Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M0, and you could buy a 32-bit chip running at 4x the clock rate for the same price as the AVR in the Arduino, and yet even today people keep using AVR-based Arduinos when the microcontroller world has moved on. People are even sticking FPGA shields on an Arduino, which is like sticking a GTX970 on a Pentium MMX. You could implement the entire AVR inside that FPGA and run it faster than the real one sitting underneath. Why this madness? Because Arduino is popular and people are scared to move on.
And now with Raspberry Pi it's the same thing all over again. When the Pi came out it almost had a good excuse, because, even though its CPU was obsolete, and Broadcom's idea of making a powerful GPU chip and sticking an old CPU "on the side" was dumb, let's face it, nobody was building Linux-capable SBCs at that price point. But that's no longer the case, you can buy much more capable boards for the same $35 today. Why on earth would they release an updated model with an updated chip in 2015 that still uses the same damn architecture that is 12 years out of date? It just makes no sense, the only reason I can come up with is internal politics at Broadcom (trying to sell off outdated chips/designs for cheap, resistance from their GPU division to having a more powerful CPU in there, or something like that).
Have they done anything to fix the random USB dropouts?
I'm running mochad on my Raspberry Pi model B (not B+) running Raspbian, but the USB drops out and stops receiving USB messages from my X10 CM15A (USB id 0bc7:0001). Restarting mochad doesn't always fix it, and fully upgrading both the firmware and raspbian didn't fix it either, so I have to reboot the raspberry pi periodically if I want the x10 remote control to work. If this isn't fixed, does anyone have a better workaround?
p.s. I wonder if the problem is due to the lack of a proper RTC. I do use ntp to keep the rpi's clock reasonably accurate. I'm not advanced enough to try to correlate ntp time adjustments with the USB going into zombie mode.
The Raspberry Pi series is an awesome hobbyist device at an impossibly low price point.
I'm glad they are finally offering more memory and multi-core processors. That way I don't need to get a BananaPi or other copycat. This way, I can continue to support the vitally important Raspberry Pi foundation and their goals.
Thanks for finally offering more memory and multi-core. Next time let's also choose a truly open framebuffer, or let's pressure Broadcom to open their VideoCore architecture once and for all.
Kriston
If you want to control a few motors and lights with network connectivity, get some ESP8266 modules - those are WiFi modules with a user-programmable 80MHz 32-bit CPU that you can buy for $5. Throw in a Cortex-M0 as a slave device to control your I/O (which can be as cheap as $1 in single quantities - yes, you can get a 32-bit CPU for $1 these days). That is what 2015 state-of-the-art silicon gets you to fit the task. A Raspberry Pi with a WiFi dongle is an order of magnitude more expensive and overpowered (and yet underpowered relative to what it claims to be, which is a Linux platform).
They really should have called it the Rho.
Except that for barely another $5-$10, you can get a much more modern CPU that is actually supported by mainstream kernels/distros.
It is completely stupid to make people jump through a lot of extra compatibility hoops and problems for the sake of the cost of lunch.
Please help metamoderate.
By which I mean, does it still have a proprietary hypervisor with a GCHQ keylogger in it? Making GNU/Linux its client, introducing a generation of children to the idea of computing at a company's suffering.
I just bought a Raspberry Pi B+..... given Murphy's law, you can all thank me for causing the Pi 2 release.... donations are accepted.
Bitcoin: 16inqK58VLVbpTNxonvayFxe42gpvwkCHi
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No it isn't. It's a quad-core Cortex A7.
It's a quad-core Cortex A7, so very firmly ARMv7.
Ignoring the actual Pi debate -
Darn those people who still use 68HC11 and 6502 controllers. You seem experienced enough to likely know yourself that if you've got a chip that's cheap enough not to ruin your BOM, that is available/in-production, does the job, has a solid toolchain, and coupled with years of development experience globally and in-house, then you don't just throw that all in the trash because something newer/faster/smaller/cheaper comes out.
Half the time I think a lot of people jump to the newest stuff because they don't like having their exclusivity eroded. Using older stuff makes sense when your product doesn't need cutting edge and you want to have a wealth of experience / dependability to draw from.
As for me, I'm still enjoying the AVR Tiny4/5/9/10 series, it's like the modern 555 ;)
Motorola HC11 was the first micro on the market with EEPROM program memory, as well as a ROM bootloader for programming it over a UART. I think it was out at least 5 years before the 16C84.
Why can I not find a link to the actual RP2B or what ever.
I can't find the B+
Can someone provide a link to this new device on the website or a link to buy it on element 14 or similar.
Thanks!
I was about to write something similar. I've developed on a Pi since the beginning and got accelerated, seamless video and picture loops to work for an ad platform currently in production. Changing to another board would cost another 300-500 hours in development costs. And that is if the other boards even have the features, most of the "other" boards don't have stable, open API to the GPU.
Mali GPUs which most of the "other boards" run just got decent acceleration in Linux in 2014, years after introduction of the chip because the manufacturer doesn't want to cooperate (and the android binary isn't a solution).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I used a few building some hobbyist level stuff and I found it easy to use, tons of software and documentation available in proper english and if you want to build network/internet enabled stuff it's way cheaper than using arduino, pic based stuff or any other thing I found available.
Latest example: I built a nixie clock with ntp sync. Is the pi wildly overpowered? Of course, but the A+ + 8gb microsd card ran me ~22eur plus the cost of a 8gb microsd and a wi-fi adapter (I had those and don't remember the original prices but probably another 10eur). I couln't find any arduino/microchip based solution with wi-fi that was even close to this price. The fact that it runs linux, can pull it's code from git has a sound card and hdmi for future use ideas is a nice bonus too.
I've had friends use allwinner based boards for similar stuff and none had the simple experience the pi provides.
About the new pi I'm much more interested if the USB bus still has the same bugs , if the ethernet is still attached to a usb hub chip, than the processor power it has. If I need networking / storage / multimedia performance I'll buy the proper tool for the job with proven reliability and open source software available not a cheap arm board no matter how good the specs sound on paper.
Where is the community for said platform? Does it give you a good example in a simple fashion? Or do I have to read reams of data sheets?
I've had to read data sheets for the Arduino but most of the stuff is easily available with plenty of examples to learn from. The cores of these processors have been around for years but until someone puts it in an easy to use package, only specialists will use it and specialists already know how to pick the best technology for a specific task.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I'm already imaginig a Beowulf cluster of these.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Not even kidding. I really am.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
There's a difference between established industrial designs where there is an argument for maintaining compatibility and an existing codebase, and hobbyists which can quite happily move up the chain and are always looking for cool new stuff in other respects. Even in product development, some companies go out of their way to use ridiculously outdated, expensive chips. That usually only flies when it's for non-consumer applications where they can afford to throw more money at a chip vendor to keep making outdated chips at outdated prices (which sometimes even rise); for consumer products the competition will undercut you by using newer, cheaper chips if you don't. For hobbyists, it actually pays off to upgrade - you get better toolchains (no need to deal with all the ROM/RAM/pointer type shenanigans of AVRs on ARM), better debuggability, etc. Of course, it doesn't mean you should jump onto any random chip - the toolchains and ecosystems vary wildly in quality - but it's a shame that so many people just stick with the old instead of trying something new.
There's nothing wrong with the Tiny series - little 6- and 8-pin chips are still the market where AVR/PIC make perfect sense, and I'll be the first to admit that I've used a PIC12F629 as a dual frequency generator in a project. But as a flexible platform for hobbyists, I'd much rather have a Cortex-M3 over an ATmega. Back when I was using PICs more often, my approach was to, every few years, re-evaluate my personal selection of PICs. I'd go through Microchip's (extensive) part database, look at the prices, and see if anything caught my eye, then order some samples. My 8-pin of choice used to be 12F508, then 12F629. For 18-pin I went from 16F84 to 16F88. 28-pin, 16F876 to 18F2520 and 18F2550 for USB. 40-pin, 16F877 to 18F4520 to 18F4550 for USB. I tried dsPIC at one point but didn't like it; by then ARM was picking up steam and it didn't make any sense. I haven't really looked at their line-up in a while, since I've mostly moved on to other chips for interesting stuff and stick to my old PICs for small quick/dirty hacks since I have a bunch in my drawers to get rid of, but you get the idea. It never made any sense to me to get stuck with one particular obsolete part or range.
Raspberry Pis are used primarily for very small tasks, controlling a few motors and lights in a haunted house gimmick, running cool Christmas lights, or an alarm system reading sensors once per second.
Actually those sound more like tasks for a simple microcontroller. Raspberry Pi can do way more complex things.
ESP8266 only became a "thing" last year, so the community is still growing. But the manufacturer is cooperating and is releasing open SDKs, and the hobbyist community is enthusiastic about it. I personally intend to use a bunch of them to automate things around my apartment, so I guess I'll find out just how good/bad it is.
That's for developing on the ESP8266 core itself - if you just want to use the default firmware, plug it into your existing microcontroller platform (e.g. Arduino) and you get wireless connectivity and a TCP/IP stack (running on the module) with some trivial AT commands. Not as cheap since you're still using a separate core as the main app host, but still a really cheap way to add WiFi to something.
Windows 8 grabs only 600 MB RAM on startup. Launch a couple of Office programs and you would still be easily under 1024 MB.
Of course this a bit past your point. You're correct that writing embedded software is quite a different task than doing GUI stuff with all the bells and whistles. :)
Nobody should be allowed to build their own computers or write software unchecked and unsupervised. These aren't the '90s anymore, the world is a more complicated and scarier place now and computers are weapons, as is software. All hardware and software should be certified by the State. We need a "computer amnesty" in which citizens can voluntarily deliver their uncertified devices for destruction in return for a safe and approved one, with heavy fines and imprisonment for non-compliers. Those DIY devices only aid criminals and terrorists.
I'm I the only one that has noticed that:
1. The official site has nothing about it
2. Broadcom has nothing on their site about a BCM2836
3. On the register photo, there is no RAM on the PI (it should be on top of the processor)
and many many more little things
The BCM2835 which is present on all the previous Pi boards contains a half-baked USB controller core which is the cause of all the USB event dropout problems. It expects realtime response from the ARM11 to handle USB's split transactions within the required 1ms response window of USB. The ARM11 cannot always meet that response spec, and so the USB user experiences a dropout.
More details are given in this post and there are plenty of threads on the raspberrypi.org forum in which the Raspberry Pi Foundation's engineers confirm the hardware fault inside the BCM2835 SoC.
The Pi range of boards have had many other USB-related problems fixed in recent versions, especially those associated with the very poor power supply circuitry of the first release. On the whole the situation is much better, but the core USB dropout problem is not fixable because it's part of the BCM2835 chip.
Hopefully the new BCM2836 in RPi 2 does not use the same half-broken USB controller core as the BCM2835.
Keep your fingers crossed.
They are, and it can. This doesn't change the way most people use it however.
Good point.
OpenVPN / ssh tunneling - raspberry pi throughoutput - around 6Mbps. Odroid-U2 throughoutput around 45Mbps.
Not to mention RPi would freeze with heavy network activity, making it pretty much useless for me. It's been collecting dust ever since I got the odroid.
yet even today people keep using AVR-based Arduinos when the microcontroller world has moved on.
8 bit CPU cores are still the most popular in the world sales wise, and for a good reason. They are cheap, extremely robust and well understood, easy to use and cheap to develop for. Those ARM cores you mentioned are a lot more work to do simple stuff. They are an order of magnitude more complex to code for.
I am an embedded software/hardware engineer. I do this for a living. 8 bit is still king, with some 16 bit stuff that isn't really that different (PIC24, MSP430) gaining ground now. Most of the time business doesn't want performance, it wants reliability and code quality, and to buy the same parts for 10+ years.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
actually the socs can be cheap as pie(literally).
however, raspberry has a primary design goal of using a broadcomm soc available from broadcomm contracted foundries with slack time, and raspberry project is a disguised for profit venture to that end.
if you grasp that, it's easy to see why they go with a chip that's crappier than what you can get in a 70 dollars smartphone(that pays licenses for 3g etc shit, comes with a charger, has hw codecs for video decode as well, comes with a battery, case and uses more expensive circuitboard design...).
I wouldn't mind actually if it had more IO pins and established realtime os, but now you can get complete android "computers" (android-in-a-box) for fifty bucks with higher specs.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Is a Rapberry Pi 2 Compute Module expected? Any news about it?
well who cares? it's effectively a closed source board and closed project anyways, since broadcomm isn't selling the chips to others and raspberry is a broadcomm tied project.
that's the funny thing about raspberry that geeks think it's open, while it's about just as open as any other stick computer, only that with raspberry they need to buy everything separately.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Had 3 Pis dying on me, despite proper power and no overclocking. The only Pi that is still running corrupts it's sdcard very few weeks.
For me Raspberry Pi is: You want cheap, you get cheap.
Now using a bunch of boards like Lime 2, Banana Pi, Odroid C1. Never had a single problem with any of them.
I do this for a living too, and I've said farewell to all the 8 bit designs I did before. I have not regretted this move at all. More memory, unified address map, more performance, better peripherals (32 bit timers, ethernet, DMA, etc), smaller packaging, cheaper, more vendor choices, same old GCC toolchain. And all it takes is a week or so of reading the user manual, and playing around with an eval board.
The CSI port is universal, but there is only one camera available from the pi foundation.
The DSI port is universal, not working after 3 years, only display usable will be from the pi foundation.
Did anyone notice this: http://dev.windows.com/en-us/featured/raspberrypi2support
Apperantly at zero cost... Might get interesting...
Not everybody is using their Raspi for simple things like that. And if there's more performance, people will also come up with higher performance applications.
Pi Foundation releases what you've been whining for since the Model B arrived.
AND YOU LOT ARE STILL WHINING!
If the Pi doesn't fit into your particular niche, then don't buy it. If the manufacturer of SuperXYZ, retailing at 4 or 5 times the price of the Pi won't reduce that to $35 then whine at them. If it doesn't chime with your IS-like open software ideology, DON'T BUY IT!
Its out there, its available, it'll do what I want it to do, so I've just bought one.
Now get off my lawn.
It not just the size of the user application that counts. People use these boards because they come with file systems, USB devices, video and networking. You can't fit all of that in 1024 bytes.
When using an Arduino, I can realize a whole project in just hours, including setting up the (very simple) IDE, starting a template project, searching and installing some helper libraries (Timer, I2C, Serial, LCD) and filling in the glue code on the position marked in the template. When using a different target, even setting up the tool chain can take days. I would have to buy hundreds or even thousands of chips until the investment in a different tool chain and the development (and debugging) of the missing libraries would pay of.
When I get stuck with an Arduino, I can find lots of documentation, lots of working (!) example code and even working (!) step-by-step tutorials (even video-tutorials). This seriously limits the risks when developing with Arduino. In the embedded world, it is very easy to find surprising show stoppers for a certain approach on a given platform.
So there are several good reasons to use Arduino (or Raspberry Pi) for home grown or semi-professional projects, even when there are other options with lower cost per chip.
Just read what you wrote:
people keep using AVR-based Arduinos when the microcontroller world has moved on.
See? That's the crux. You may have moved on, because you care about some things. Guess what, there are others that don't. People that do one time projects go with what's more accessible and easier. Most of the world population doesn't care the slightest about where the "microcontroller world" is today, or what they consider state of the art. If something is easy to get, easy to work with, and does the work, then it what you should use.
People use these boards because they come with file systems, USB devices, video and networking. You can't fit all of that in 1024 bytes.
Challenge accepted. ;)
give me mali400
http://dev.windows.com/en-us/f...
AFAIK all you guys have been waiting for this day:
http://dev.windows.com/en-us/featured/raspberrypi2support
I'm laughing at those Windows 8 users posting here complaining that a friggin GIG of RAM isn't enough.
It's not enough to play full PC, which if you RTFA (maybe not this article, I didn't bother) is one of the goals of this model. Fail, fail. Android devices have been coming with 2GB for absolutely ages now.
I'd buy an alternative just because Sony gets a buck or two when you buy one of these, and I want them to go out of business.
Of course some people use them as entertainment media centers. That's kind of the one oddball use that needs a thousand times the resources of most things people use their Pi for.
And 1GB will be fine for that, so those aren't the people who are bitching.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You said goodbye to 8-bit based solely on how you program and a desire to do something more advanced?
How interesting! So maybe you should buy a 32bit ARM processor then to blink an LED. Oh are you now going to say it's overpowered?
I program on a mix of 32bit and 8bit. I pick the tool for the job. Look around online and see the millions of projects where an Arduino is waaay overpowered for the project in which it's used and you'll realise how absurd the argument is.
same problem as the Arduino: both are based on an ancient, woefully outdated platform
Ancient and outdated? I believe the platform the Arduino is based on is one of the single most popular *currently* selling platforms on the market. Or are you saying we now need to upgrade to 32bit ARMs just so we can blink an LED?
Kids these days.
You said goodbye to 8-bit based solely on how you program and a desire to do something more advanced?
No, where did I say that ? I actually put the more advanced features to good use. Sometimes, it is possible to do the same stuff on 8 bit platforms, but it takes more effort. For instance, the AVR has separate program and data memory, which is just a pain. Given the difference in price, it's usually not worth it to use 8 bits. And in many cases, 8 bit CPUs aren't even cheaper, except for the very low end, and then the difference only makes sense in high volume.
Are you on drugs?
Do you want some? I think it might help.
-Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience-
Ok I bit. I rebooted, fired up Word on a blank document and opened outlook.
1.6GB in use and 1.8GB committed.
No Windows 8, like Windows 7 is effectively unusable on 1GB of RAM.
Oh hey look, prefetch finished. 2.2GB in use 2.8GB committed.
The fact that it's a popular hobbyist platform doesn't mean it's not ancient and outdated. Also, blinking LEDs isn't the only application for microcontrollers.
> ssh tunneling - raspberry pi throughoutput - around 6Mbps
6Mbps is 750,000 bytes per second. For ssh, that's around 750,000 key strokes per second. You must be a very fast typist. :)
Okay, there is high protocol overhead, so maybe 160,000 keystrokes per second. Still, I can't type that fast, so it would be more than I'd be able to use.
.... does the job, has a solid toolchain, and coupled with years of development experience globally and in-house, then you don't just throw that all in the trash because something newer/faster/smaller/cheaper comes out
You don't work with Windows development shops then!!
>. People use these boards because they come with file systems, USB devices, video and networking.
If you're using all that, maybe for a remotely accessible security camera system, plenty of Linux distributions are available which provide that in 16MB. OpenWrt is one example. So the rPI has 64 times as much memory as you need for the job.
Yes, but I'm currently designing data logging equipment that runs for 5+ years on a couple of AA batteries. It doesn't need ethernet, or high performance, or more memory... In fact, those things just waste power and make hitting the 5+ year battery life harder. When the device is in the "active" state logging actual data it runs at 250kHz... Not megahertz, kilohertz. There isn't any point going faster, it would just waste power.
What's more this thing will be manufactured with minimal changes for 15+ years. Some manufacturers offer ARM microcontrollers with guaranteed long production life times, but then you are back to the low end of performance anyway and the cost is always way higher than 8 bit parts.
It's the old "good/fast/cheap, pick any two" choice again.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Check nodemcu: https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware This is a lua interpreter for the chip. If your application is simple (control some lights, bla bla) then with this you can probably code it in half a day.
You can also program the module in C, but that requires installing some software. About the same as installing arduino studio but then the esp8266 sdk...
What's with all the ACs in this thread, anyway? Yes, the original A/B models had crappy USB, but the A+/B+ have much-improved circuitry, to the point that for most things you'll never need to bother with adding a hub.
I set up a B+ as a Bluetooth audio streaming box, and, while running off a 1000 mA power supply, the USB is stout enough to power a keyboard, mouse, Bluetooth dongle, and a Focusrite USB audio interface, all plugged into the onboard USB ports. That would have never worked on the older model.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
>. It's not enough to play full PC, which if you RTFA (maybe not this article, I didn't bother) is one of the goals
I see that you're a Windows customer. I've run a full GUI desktop, web browser, etc., and a web server on the same machine just for fun, in 32 MB. Would I recommend a $35 Pi as the best choice for a desktop? No, that's not the intent of this $35 experimenter's board.
Because it doesn't sell for $750?
You don't work with Windows development shops then!!
Right you are :D
Western Design Center still makes quite a bit of money selling those 65c02s and 65c816s. :P
Sorry marcansoft, the more you post in this thread I get the idea you are a moron an idiot, probably both or a troll or all of it.
What is your fucking problem, excuse my language?
Who in the western world cares if a once in a lifetime purchase is $35 or $20? How many Raspery Pi boards are you going to buy in the foreseeable future?
What are you going to do with them, that you need a more modern processor?
All your ranting is just for naught. Since ARM 3, the processors actually have not changed much. For any use except esoteric cases it fucking does not matter that a SoC uses a 10 year old design.
If you buy a car with modern driver assistance, lane detection, sign detection, pedestrian detection etc. guess on what hardware it runs? It is in the 250MB 1GHz ARM Cortex M0 or M4 range. Texas Instruments crafts the boards, 4 ARM cores and two DSPs ... one DSP and 2 ARMs are not even used but still they do stereo video capturing and analyzation and break your shiny new Audi, Toyota, Mercedes or BMW and I believe even Porsche if a child runs into your driving path: automatically!
So you want to tell us you know lots about ARMs and you are so smart?
Sorry, I for my part perceive you as an complete idiot and moron, and I guess I'm not the only one.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Good catch! OLPC lost a lot of developer mindshare IMHO when they started cosying up to Microsoft and changing their hardware to run Windows. Example:
http://www.olpcnews.com/softwa...
"For me, that paragraph represents the end of a dream. I say that XP on the XO is the end of One Laptop Per Child as an educational project. With a Microsoft operating system, an XO becomes a "$200 laptop", a cheap Toshiba replacement, not an educational learning tool for children. With the Sugar User Interface, OLPC can claim to have a Constructionist learning methodology, it can claim to be promoting exploration and learning, it can even hope to activate the view source key. But once you put on XP, no matter how much it may be customized to leverage the XO hardware, children will not be taught to "learn learning" as Negroponte promised. They will be taught "ICT skills", a phrase Negroponte himself railed against. Ministries of Education will be tempted to lock down XO's in computer labs and revert the whole one laptop per child idea back to one to many, effectively negating the goal of this grand dream. Yes, for me XP on the XO is the end of OLPC, no matter who is the CEO."
Hope Raspberry Pi does not suffer the same fate -- especially as I recently bought two B+ versions, :-) not knowing about either of these forthcoming changes (better hardware or Windows).
The last week or so, I've been watching for the new Beagleboard-X15, which is both open source hardware (Raspberry Pi design is not quite open hardware it seems) and will answer a lot of performance and memory issues at least compared to the Raspberry Pi B+ or the Beaglebone Black. ... Guidance is that it is certainly over $100 ..."
http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:...
http://beagleboard.org/project...
"The BeagleBoard-X15 is the newest member of the BeagleBoard family. Measuring 4" x 4.2", it is based on a Dual Core A15 processor running at 1.5GHZ and features 2GB of DDR3L Memory. It is in the beta phase.
So, that board is a lot pricier than this newer (or older) Raspberry Pi though. Not too much for a typical home office server use as an example (like to run NodeJS locally for testing on a separate non-VM box), but still 3X to 4X more for the board. However, when you add a case, extra media like a hard disk or big USB flash drive, and a power supply, and a wireless dongle, and so on, I doubt the overall cost is probably that much more than 2X for an entire system with the Beagleboard-X15.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
An AllWinner CPU is a good performer but the datasheet is only available in Chinese. The reason it's so cheap is that they didn't spend any money getting it translated or providing support overseas
Tsk, tsk, tsk ...
English Language Datasheets for Allwinner CPUs are aplenty, my man
For example - https://linux-sunxi.org/images/e/eb/A13_Datasheet.pdf
Disclaimer: I do not read Chinese
Even I can read that datasheet !
There is no difference in complexity to code for a 6502 or an ARM, this argument/idea is just bullshit. If at all programming a 6502 is less straight forward than an ARM.
Either you use C, then there is definitely no difference at all, or you use assembler directly.
Sorry, I don't buy that you work in embedded environments, or you would not claim such nonsense.
However your last two sentences are true.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
My Windows 8.1 tablet has a gig of memory and a quad core Atom. It actually runs MS Office (2013, not 365) completely fine.
Considering that an ARM instruction is 32 but wide, only 3 instructions fit into your 24 byte RAM usage example ;)
But the tenor of your post is quite right.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
... the Raspberry Pi has a large and growing ecosystem behind it -- developers (hardware and software), users, and more.
The Arduino is a similar beast -- underpowered, overpriced, and with a tremendous ecosystem, approachable and available to new classes of users ...
Those making this kind of argument never knows what happened to IBM true blue PC when clones emerges
Yes, when IBM brought out their IBM PC an ecosystem sprung up, and when PC clones came along the ecosystem grew even bigger ... and bigger still ... until the volume of the clones became so large that it eclipsed the true blue IBM PC --- and IBM thought that huge ecosystem was theirs, and tried very hard to distance themselves from the clones, by introducing a completely incompatible architecture the "MCA" ... which signed the downfall of true blue IBM PC
Same thing here ... the Raspberry Pi may have created an ecosystem, but that ecosystem does not belong to Raspberry Pi
As more clones come in, that ecosystem will grow and evolved, and sooner or later the volume of the clones will eclipse the original Raspberry Pi, and when that happen ... no matter which clone you or your children use, the ecosystem will support them
My (200 byte) program is in the ROM, I'm using the RAM for data. ;)
I don't buy that you do either. I spent 6 years of my life programming 6502 assembly when writing games and "demos" on the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, and I spent another 4 years programming ARM assembly when doing games and "demos" for the GameBoy Advance. Thumb/ARM is not complicated, not hard to learn, but it is nowhere near so defining of simplicity and straight-forwardness as the 6502 is.
s/break/brake/
I saw them on Element 14 this morning and pre-purchased one. Now their site is down and can't get to Adafruit either. Hummm I guess people DO want these.
I just got my geekgasm!
Most rPI projects are also done on Arduinos and similar
No they're not. I would expect Slashdot to know the difference between a microcomputer and a microcontroller.
as motor control
I would never trust motor control to something like this without it getting full RTOS support.
Currently running Atom based Mini ITX system with PFSense and Snort.
Could the Pi 2 replace this setup?
I'd say that plain ARM assembly is more straightforward than 6502 assembly, and that Thumb is a bit harder, because of the irregularities. Maybe your perception is different because you forgot how long it took to master 6502 assembly.
if you're using a Pi to drive motors and lights I would likely question your ability. Don't be The Suck.
Your hello world program that toggles some GPIO pins will run on a tiny PIC, sure. Duh.
Thats not the point.
The standard operating system (At this point we can call Linux THE standard commodity OS, network stack, GUI, GPU, network interface, USB ports that make the Pi accessible to beginners need a lot more heft.
Try teaching a beginner to program a PIC and you will fail. They don't have the electronics knowledge and low level programming languages are way out of their depth. Teach a beginner to flash some lights through a web browser and you start the learning process.
Even in advanced projects the Pi isnt a bad idea.. Because your flashing lights project can jump to a network-connected information appliance (with an LCD display!) with some cheap add-on modules and some more advanced programming. You can't do that with a PIC.
The silicon is cheap and low power enough. Might as well use it even if you don't plan to use it's full capability. You might in the future.
do stereo video capturing and analyzation and break your shiny new Audi
complete idiot and moron
Agreed.
Try classic Game Boy or GBC programming, the custom Z80-like CPU is a blast with its ~1024 instructions.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Finally a more powerful computer to run arcade and console emulators!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I didn't say everyone SHOULD use an MCU.
I said the same type of projects ALSO run on MCU, so a billion bytes of RAM is a few thousand times more than required.
Can I program them in 90 seconds with a bash script though? That to me is the appeal of the PI. Linux OS and a quick script or 5 and I forget about it. If my background was in PLC, then I would probably be able to do the same. It's not though. Plus I am not skilled in hardware/soldering etc.
Good catch! OLPC lost a lot of developer mindshare IMHO when they started cosying up to Microsoft and changing their hardware to run Windows.
True; however, OLPC never had as big an audience as Rasberry Pi has; so the momentum will likely continue with Windows being an "also ran" that was "late to market" kind of thing.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Looks like this Raspberry Pi enclosure is everything you have been dreaming of: http://www.ebay.com/itm/151551288999
It could be a process issue, too. Maybe whatever process they use to manufacture the GPU isn't compatible with the current ARM cores?
Hobbyists make up a tiny portion of the market. Teeny-tiny. 8bit AVRs are some of the most popular micros in end user products that don't need to run Linux. Phones have multi-core ARM. Televisions have multi-core ARM. Ovens, bread makers, tv remote controls, garage door openers (remotes and motor units), digital multimeters, etc frequently use ATTiny, ATMega, or ATXmega.
I'd say that plain ARM assembly is more straightforward than 6502 assembly
That was my point. It is not so that e.g. 6502 is that complicated, but most 8 bit processors try to be 16 bit ones using tricks.
In the 6502 case it is the usage of the 'zero page' which gives the processor some '16 bit' capabilities.
But it makes everything a bigger processo does out of the box a bit complicated.
So IMHO 68k, ARM etc. are really easy to program on, most 8 bits are not.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The fact that it's a popular hobbyist platform
Oh wow.... You know nothing about the industry do you! The Arduino is barely a piss by an old person with a swollen prostate in the ocean that is AVR sales.
You're probably sitting withing arms reach of 10 AVR devices right now. Hope you enjoy using your "outdated" platform. But you are right. Blinking lights isn't the only application for microcontrollers. I have also used them as a fully autonomous drone flight controller complete with live telemetry, a webserver, a control unit for a wireless network of industrial sensors, ...
Yeah truly horrendous technology, it will never succeed outside the hobbyist market and it certainly isn't the single biggest and best selling product line of a company with $1.5bn/yr of revenue.
I think that was the 68HC811E2. I preferred the 68HC11 series but switched to the PIC16C84 and PIC in general as quickly as possible because Motorola being Motorola, Microchip's PIC16C84 had significant advantages in pricing and availability.
I still have some 68HC811E2 and 68HC24 parts in PLCC packages which are my favorite to work with.
And they serve different purposes and goals, more importantly. The Raspberry Pi is designed to be a general hobbyist platform and OS choice is a good thing there.
If you're going to be archaic and use Greek letters, you've got to decide how archaic you want to be. San alphabetizes between Pi and Qoppa, which comes before Rho. The Greeks got their letters from the Phoenicians, who used more sibilants than the Greeks did, so San eventually got dropped in favor of Sigma, which was pretty much the same sound for them. (They kept Sigma, Xi, and Zeta.) And Qoppa mostly got replaced with Kappa after a while. (There were other letters as well; Digamma looks like an F, and fit into the F/V/W letter space, used for words like woinos (wine, which mostly dropped the digamma by the classical period, but earlier writers like Homer used it.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I haven't done much with the RPi, partly because my TV got packed away during some construction and I haven't dragged it back out after that got finished, and the monitors I have at work use VGA or DisplayPort. But the times I've tried using it with borrowed HDMI monitors, it was really picky about staying in sync. Maybe it's a power problem? One reason I picked the RPi over the BeagleBone Black was it claimed to do 1080p at 60 Hz vs. only 30 on the BBB, but it wasn't handling 60Hz very well even just running simple Raspbian. (Of course, it could also have been the monitor I was using.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think OLPC's failure was less due to their relationship with Microsoft and more to the rise of cheap tablets in the consumer market. I don't see any consumer product competing with the RPI yet. The ChromeBox is close, but ChromeOS is too limited really to compete.
I learnt recently not to use rpi-update to get the latest firmware/kernel/bootloader - the 3.18 kernel etc. breaks WiFi dongles etc.
Apparently to support the Pi 2, the 3.18 kernel etc. is now in general release (apt) - WiFi dongle breaks again.
RPi forums down except for ads to buy the new Pi 2... WTF?!
And they serve different purposes and goals, more importantly. The Raspberry Pi is designed to be a general hobbyist platform and OS choice is a good thing there.
True; but so it being able to make the device do what you want. And Windows has too much overhead to really be useful on a Pi or even the Pi2.
Seriously, when is the last time you tried to run Visual Studios on a sub 1GHz system with only 1 GB or even 2 GB of RAM? VS is practically unusable in those environments; yet a compiler is a must for the audience that the Pi and Pi2 are targetted at.
So is device driver development and access to low level hardware in a timely manner. Yet the performance of Windows will not be sufficient for that.
Realize, this is Microsoft trying to soften the bleeding that is happening; but it will probably only show just how badly they meet end-user needs in the environments where the bleeding is occurring.
To Microsoft, it's not about choice. It's about survival and they don't have something that can compete.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
This is the IoT build, and you would run Visual Studio on another desktop system and upload the programs to the Pi.
Aren't you running any antimalware?
This is the IoT build, and you would run Visual Studio on another desktop system and upload the programs to the Pi.
Again, compared to existing Pi use-cases where the compiler is on the Pi system itself. So now you can't develop with just a RasberryPi, you have to have another Windows System too.
That too doesn't resolve the Device Driver issue; it also means users have to install and learn how to use the Visual Studios Remote Debugger or learn more advanced (older style) debugging techniques.
All those things are not in the favor of Windows for development of software for a RasberryPi or Pi2 device.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
XBMC distros are a huge slice of the total OS pie (no pun intended). It's far from "the one oddball". Let's say if you buy a board with a gig of ram and a relatively high powered processor, you want to do more than run a few servos... Media center, cloud server, are you going to run that on metal? If a Linux kernel is just a convenience...
and will answer a lot of performance and memory issues at least compared to the Raspberry Pi B+ or the Beaglebone Black.
but comparing it to those isn't really fair. Assuming it will be somewhere between $100-$200 that would put it in the same price bracket as the higher end options from the likes of wandboard, solidrun and odriod or even the atom based minnowboard.
And viewed in amongst that pack it doesn't seem especially exciting. I guess if you really must have both A15 cores (but only 2 of them) and native SATA then it may be a good option
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register