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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+."
You can find chinese SoC boards with much more performance and RAM for as little as $5-10 more. Yeah yeah, everyone gets it, the Pi is not meant to be a work horse and no one ever claimed otherwise, but what good is it if it's a total pain in the arse to use because of way too little power and memory to offer up a decent user experience? There's just no rationalizing away the fact that they have been grossly underpowered regardless of context. This new model steps up a little bit but it's still a few paces behind where it could be for the same $35.
You can buy a dual core Cortex-A9 Android phone in China for about $40, give or take. And that comes with a screen. Sorry, SoCs are dirt cheap these days and the price point isn't an excuse to ship a 12-year-old core (seriously, ARM11 came out in late 2002).
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.
Phones come with a touchscreen, speakers, microphones, WiFi, Bluetooth, GSM, and an accelerometer, which also cost money. Probably more money than a few connectors on a board.
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.
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?
I think they're trying to maintain compatibility with the existing ecosystem. The GPU did not change, they just added 3 more cores and another half gig of RAM. This is a drop-in replacement to keep their product competitive without breaking anything too drastic with their existing product line. Sort of along the lines of why the iPhone 5 had a taller screen and iPhone 6 actually had a usable sized screen. Baby steps. Those Chinese phone sellers don't have to support that product after they wrap it in bubble wrap and drop it in the mail; the RPi organization has industrial customers who have standardized on their hardware as a Long Term Solution and make up a sizable portion of their business (they're forcasting approx 20% of their business in 2015 will be industrial customers). So there's that.
The Raspberry Pi 3 in 2017 or so should be pretty amazing, between that phone you linked to, and the new ESP8266 it's clear we've only waded hip-deep in to the era of ultra low energy, high powered wireless devices. In the mean time this is a very acceptable bump in performance to what originally was an educational toy.
moox. for a new generation.
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).
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
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 ;)
It's everything the Pi and Pi 2 is, and everything the Pi and Pi 2 never will be, for the same $35.
Except for the documentation and support. The Pi is an educational computer, there are loads of tutorials, books, accessories and datasheets available for it. Your kids won't find their school offering classes for it. Good luck getting support on driver bugs, or even diagnosing why your stuff doesn't work. The Odroid might be more powerful but it isn't really suitable for n00bs.
It's the same with the Arduino. People laugh because performance is crap and it's over-priced, but it's also much easier than anything else out there and hence very popular.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
The point of a Raspberry Pi isn't to replace an Intel i7 clocked at 3GHz, it's to replace a 6502 clocked at 2MHz: to provide kids with a system to hack on. You don't need shedloads of performance to develop great software, and, indeed, the less resource you have, the more inclined you are to code tightly and efficiently. As a learning tool, less really can be more.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
So no one said you had to buy a rPi. Go buy the Chinese board instead.
What you'll find is probably no shocker. First, you can order the board today, but tomorrow no, the board is completely different and won't work with your software today.
Second, your board is obsolete and no matter how you beg, they will not make more, so you have to move your project to a new board and start over.
Third, documentation? If you're lucky, it's in Chinese. Forget about a community - these guys just produce hardware, get something running and ship it. If it happens to work, good on you.
One of the biggest advantages the Pi has over everyone else is the community. It's big, it's documented and everyone got their stuff working so you can Google or ask for help.
Just think that in the time the Pi has been around and outclassed, there are probably dozens of "rPi killers" boards that were produced with faster processors, better hardware,, and not a lot more dollars ($5-15). Problem is, they fizzled not because they weren't good, but they were one-shot products. The Pi sold millions, these manufacturers maybe do a run of 10,000 then move on to something new, never again to bother with the design because they needed to use up some spare parts.