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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+."
Maybe you should take two minutes and read the FAQ. The Raspberry Pi's primary design goal was to be low cost. There are a hundred other companies now selling more powerful (and expensive) boards. This was designed to be a learning tool for students and hobbyists, not a set top multimedia box.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Well, when you design a board with all the Pi's features, with your choice of SOC, that can be effectively sold at a $35 price point, you let us know. Until then, why don't you just accept that there are various products out there, with various strengths and weaknesses (and various prices!), and accept that some people have managed to do some pretty cool things with the original Pi, and no doubt they will do more cool things with this version.
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/
If you insist that 4 USB ports and an array of GPIO pins are the main selling features, then let me present to you the Odroid C1: http://www.hardkernel.com/main...
It's everything the Pi and Pi 2 is, and everything the Pi and Pi 2 never will be, for the same $35.
They arent, Its 4x A7 with Neon this time.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Whoops, you're right. Other pages claimed it was an MT6517, but I just checked /proc/cpuinfo. Still, A7 is still a modern core, 9 years newer than ARM11.
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 3 (v7l)
processor : 0
BogoMIPS : 2589.52
processor : 1
BogoMIPS : 2589.52
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0xc07
CPU revision : 3
Hardware : MT6572
(0xc07 means Cortex-A7)
No it isn't. It's a quad-core Cortex A7.
It's a quad-core Cortex A7, so very firmly ARMv7.
Ironically, the chip WAS designed as a set top multimedia box (as was the original BCM2635 - which was used in the Roku 2).
The thing is, you offload the video decoding to the GPU (which is why it has a VideoCore IV, which is ridiculously overpowered compared to the CPU). The ARM processor's job is to feed the beast with data - handle networking, basic GUI, etc.
Now, what you're not doing with it is CPU intensive apps.
There's just no rationalizing away the fact that they have been grossly underpowered regardless of context.
I have to disagree there. They are plenty powerful for learning basic coding on. They're plenty powerful for a basic web server for a local network. They're plenty powerful for controlling various bits of hardware via the GPIO port. They're plenty powerful for plenty of 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.
The Raspberry Pi has the hardware to be very cheap while still being able to connect to a general lab setup and powerful enough for a lot of nice little projects.
They released all the docs for the GPU, drivers are on their way http://dri.freedesktop.org/wik... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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.