Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
No it isn't. It's a quad-core Cortex A7.
It's a quad-core Cortex A7, so very firmly ARMv7.
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?...