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New Multi-Core Raspberry Pi 2 Launches

Posted by samzenpus on from the brand-new dept.

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+."

3 of 355 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU by YukariHirai · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. USB dropout is a BCM2835 fault, not fixable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:What about the GPU? by ssam · · Score: 5, Informative

    They released all the docs for the GPU, drivers are on their way http://dri.freedesktop.org/wik... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...