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+."
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!).
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
Most likely to maintain binary compatibility with instruction sets / extensions. But I could be wrong. It may also be a cost factor.
These boards are meant for hacking together projects and education. At a $35 price point, it's "good enough."
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.
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.
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.
"This was designed to be a learning tool for students and hobbyists, not a set top multimedia box." If that was true it would not have anywhere near the specs it has. It has on the order of 2000 times the power of a student learning device. And Other for profit boards are available at the same price with over double the specs. Enough specs to actually function decently.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Phones don't come with analog or digital brakeouts. Can't compare the Pi to a phone. Apples and oranges.
Well, the Chinese have managed to design a phone with a screen, dual radios, WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio, and a dual core Cortex-A9 CPU that can be effectively sold for $40 or so (if you buy it in China, not online). If the Chinese can build in a CPU core that's two generations newer into a product with support for 3 radio standards and a screen that sells for $5 or so more than the Pi, why is Broadcom struggling with an outdated 12-year-old core on a product with no wireless?
But can it handle HEVC?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Android has an NDK to develop native apps that target the CPU instruction set directly. Unreal Engine for Android isn't written in Java.
Uff, how can you talk about ".crapNET" bloatware when your name indicates you are a Ruby fanboy? :D
The problem with the Pi isn't whether you want to run X on it or not.
The Android sticks run Linux, too. I have an RK3188-based stick that cost me $45 (shipping included), and I run a modified version of Ubuntu on it. Compared to the Pi the experience is wonderful, across the board.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Chinese SBC's all still have that horrible Mali400 GPU, and rely on the train-wreck that is the "linux-sunxi" toolchain. The expense of the RPi is that it "just works" so you can focus on your making/tinkering/hardware hacking, rather than spending countless nights pissing about with half-working video drivers.
They arent, Its 4x A7 with Neon this time.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
And millions of kiddies keeled over in excitement!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
This.
From a link (http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=zNxgHtdA) in the comments here:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
BogoMIPS : 38.40
Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0xc07
CPU revision : 5
El Reg's article is very misleading. Are there ANY quad core ARM SoCs or designs, at all?
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.
Dual core A9? You sure about that?
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.
I don't run Ruby on my embedded stuff. But you made me curious, so I just looked at rss of a 3 liner Ruby program that loops with a sleep, 4864 pages or 19.5MB. I also happen to know from experience that a Ruby forking daemon that does web-like or smtp-like stuff will use up 100MB.
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).
I'm pretty sure the newer generations of ARM are supersets of the older ones. You could upgrade the processor in the Pi to something recent without breaking ABI compatibility. In fact it would be easier to get stuff like Chrome working on the board since the precompiled binaries are too recent for the processor in the Pi.
I read the internet for the articles.
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-$10, you can get a much more modern CPU that is actually supported by mainstream kernels/distros.
It is completely stupid to make people jump through a lot of extra compatibility hoops and problems for the sake of the cost of lunch.
Please help metamoderate.
I've since sold off all my Pi gear to enthusiasts, but the three killers for me at the time (Model B) were:
USB dropouts, as you mentioned.
Memory card corruption (occasionally, known-good cards, but what a bummer).
GPU crashes on certain videos.
Plus I could get more ADC pins elsewhere. But I did tell myself I'd revisit the Pi when the 2 came out - the community size is much better.
I'm hopeful, but these problems are well-known, so I'd love to see them addressed directly.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The B+ is supposed to have addressed the USB problems. Can't say because I haven't bought one yet, I still have two of the original model Bs.
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.
It seems they just edited the article. It used to claim it was still ARM11.
Too bad Slashdot doesn't allow editing comments... oh well. I guess my first first post on /. will forever be a record of El Reg's poor reporting.
TFA used to claim that it was still ARM11. They just edited it a few minutes ago. I stand transitively corrected.
I actually tried to look up any official announcements to corroborate the fact that it was still ARM11 before posting my first comment (because it just felt so dumb), but found none, no mentions of the new chip on Broadcom's site, nothing. I guess they trusted El Reg with the scoop and they screwed it up.
The title on your original link does say MTK6572, and from the pastebin linked elsewhere it seems the RPi2 is also a Cortex-A7. I agree it's still a pretty old architecture though.
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 ;)
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.
Yup, all the other aliexpress pages I was looking at for the same phone said MTK6517, and I didn't notice that the one that I chose was different (I was just going for the lowest price, though the difference was a few bucks). Turned out to be the more accurate one it seems, since it matches the actual device that I have.
A7 is actually decent. It's low-end (as far as ARMv7 application processors go) but reasonably modern (late 2011, which isn't too bad). Nobody's asking for a bleeding-edge CPU in something like the Pi, but a 2002 vintage core wouldn't have made any sense.
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
Which is also annoying, because you're going to want a different kernel and a different set of packages (the A7 supports Thumb-2, the ARM11 on the old RPi didn't and Thumb-2 gives much better code density / i-cache usage, which leads to better performance). The main advantage of the RPi was that it was a known ARM hardware configuration that had a few million deployed and so was worth supporting by operating systems. Fragmenting this risks putting them in the same category as all of the other ARM boards.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
NOT ARM11, It will have Cortex-A7 4 core chip... BCM2836 is using four Cortex-A7 (ARMv7)
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 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.
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.
You can find chinese SoC boards with much more performance and RAM for as little as $5-10 more.
R-Pi has more extensive documentation and a huge support community.
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.
Why are they still shipping the same CPU core that was in the iPhone 2G?
Probably because they're selling it for $35. Get over yourself.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
not only that, but unlike alternatives, this is the only one I found that my TV's USB port can power. so my B+ is powered by TV and feeds the TV via HDMI. I'm not sure even this newer version will be able to live without an external power adaptor. I know nobody cares but I for one won't be upgrading anytime soon.
I did have to make some changes to raspbian's filesystems so that switching off TV didn't leave dirty bits on filesystems, but it was fun tinkering with it.
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.
Good point.
Yes, but can you get proper English language documentation for them? 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.
Also, Broadcom parts have a longer production life than the really low cost ones. They will be able to buy the same or fully compatible parts in five years time and keep making the same Raspberry Pi boards, providing a fixed hardware platform for people to work with. The low cost parts tend to get replaced fairly quickly. The people making those cheap phones will first look for some cheap SoCs and LCDs, then build the phone around them and make 100,000, and that's it. Parts are now obsolete and no longer manufactured, and the whole process repeats.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I did have to make some changes to raspbian's filesystems so that switching off TV didn't leave dirty bits on filesystems, but it was fun tinkering with it.
I'm very interested in the changes you've made. Please could you contact me about this ?
Thanks in advance
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
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
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
Is a Rapberry Pi 2 Compute Module expected? Any news about it?
I expect a quad core CPU will improve things somewhat for media playing - the original Pi just about managed it assuming you had the codecs unlocked but it didn't have the juice to power the UI of something like MythTV so it could really chug at times. I wonder if sticking with Broadcom is something of a poisoned chalice given that there are so many affordable and more powerful SoCs they could use instead.
It's not meant to be a set top multimedia box yet it is powered by a set top multimedia CPU, comes with an HDMI out, LAN, and has hardware codecs for audio and video... It's hardly surprising that people would want to use it in such a way.
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...
Have a check which model you got. Atleast with the early RAM bump, the new models shipped before the annoucement, so some people ordered the old one, and received the new one.
I think the Raspberry Pi's main strength is the community around it. That's what other boards including the Banana Pi would fail to supply. From a hardware perspective it is underpowered though.
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.
Different poster, but I did the same. Start by looking for 'read-only filesystem raspbian'. You'll find a bunch of tutorials which tell you how to stop logs etc. and mount the system in read-only mode, together with some nice scripts for dropping in and out of read/write mode for updates.
First link I found which looks relatively sane is http://blog.pi3g.com/2014/04/make-raspbian-system-read-only/
For me, I wanted to have the Pi in the car and the accessory power has a habit of going off without warning when I stop the car, this allowed me to have it auto-boot up when the power comes on and not worry about shutting down properly. I also have a USB hard-drive containing the media which is mounted read-only. All together I have an in-car wifi hotspot running a webserver which is capable of streaming music and movies to android devices - it keeps the kids happy on long journeys and all 3 of them are able to watch different movies. The only down-side is that I sometimes have to reboot after initial power-on as the usb HD appears to draw a little too much power during spin-up and doesn't always register.
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.
If you have 1GB, then 19.5MB is little.
i played with making filesystems RO and logging to a remote syslog server + using shm/tmpfs wherever i could but i ended up using overlayFS which is similar to what you suggested. the iterative steps were quite fun though. i should have taken notes.
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
When you consider that the i386 on which I first ran Linux back in 93 could manage about 15 BogoMIPS, that's ridiculously powerful!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
http://dev.windows.com/en-us/f...
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.'"
*This. You can't ever compare the cost of a Chinese only product with the production cost of any commercial item in the west.
The Chinese operate on a pump and dump system. There was a good article on the economics of it on hackaday last year sometime. Effectively you end up with single run items pinout compatible with a variety of devices, a common board design to make whatever shit you got that day work, you run off a few 10s of thousands and then retool the layout and repeat with whatever you can get the day after.
Poor documentation isn't even the half of it. I often joke that it's much like the early Sony PS3s where they couldn't get the cell processors yield up so they just decided to ship whatever they got that day. Some people had 8 working cores, some people had less.
That's not the kind of device you want in a well documented consistent learning platform that forms the centre of a modular ecosystem.
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.
Oh noes, you're going to be disappointed -)
According to the BBC
but its makers have also promised it will be able to support Microsoft's next operating system at a later date.
"For the last six months we've been working closely with Microsoft to bring the forthcoming Windows 10 to Raspberry Pi 2.
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-
Oh wait! I know this one! Because we're not in China! (You can offer things at an amazing price point when you pay just slightly more than slave labor wages to your employees.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yeah and these things are SoC/hobbist devices. Chances are you aren't multitasking with them they are being used to do one thing at a time. You can get a lot done in pretty much any language with 1GB of Ram. You won't spin up a big database system but who the heck would be hosting a database on a cellphone processor anyways (not sqllite but I mean production scale)? Sure you want your code to run well on the hardware but does a 2X bloat really matter even at 900Mhz? I don't know maybe, but maybe the bloat is that it uses less complicated instructions, or has more diagnostics support on a crash etc.
Don't get me wrong I don't think I've used a rails app that I found performant, at best I'd say "it was pretty cool functionality wise and free so I leaved with it", but then again that is true for 90% of java apps too. There is a minimum bar you have to pass for performance on user side stuff (server is a different story but you usually have a revenue stream to afford to pay for something fast if that is what it takes to get it) afterwards sad to say but it becomes how simple is it to get my task done? and does it look pretty while it does it?
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!!
The manufacturer of that phone buys parts by the millions. They probably have a blanket order for them. You get a pretty steep discount at those volumes. The R.P.F. probably buys a few tens of thousands at a time - maybe.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
>. 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
The 'multi' in SIMD and 'multi media' are not related.
You don't need any SIMD instructions to display a video or to produce audio from an mpeg/ogg or whatever.
Why your question might be valid, your reasoning is not.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I think this would be a useful function for other uses of the Pi where it sometimes needs to be on and sometimes needs to be off.
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.
The register broke a press embargo then put the misinformation about the core in a reply to a comment. Everyone who knew better was forbidden from commenting to correct them for another 7 hours or so.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
How many IO ports does the phone have?
Can it connect to a real keyboard and a real screen (TV or monitor)?
How much RAM does it have/support?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You don't work with Windows development shops then!!
Right you are :D
> m using a Pi as an SVN server and it wont stay up and running for more than a month without locking up.
I have three Pis about my house. two Bs and one B+. Two attached to robots and one as a GIT server & small websever. All stay up for MONTHS (the up time on the Git server was over a year when I finally upgraded the software on it).
Sure this is on anecdote vs someone elses. And the USB stack on the original did suck (pull more than X power and you need a powered hub).
Hell, you're complaining about the CPU ... ... I'm still waiting for an cheap embedded GPU that doesn't suck for 3D shader performance and provides open access to registers instead of a binary blob. :-)
I'm not complaining because for $35 you are getting one hell of a deal !
After paying $1,000 for my GTX Titan I realize it is going to be about 15 years before we can see that level of performance in the embedded device space. That's OK -- gives me more time for R&D. :-) The only other practical hardware is the nVidia Shield Tablet, but for $300 that is 10x the cost.
My understanding is that the hardware IS open, so you if you think there is sufficient demand for a more powerful ultra-tiny learning computer, you're free to 'fork' it make a new model.
But yeah, hopefully in 2 years we'll get a major spec increase bump.
Western Design Center still makes quite a bit of money selling those 65c02s and 65c816s. :P
RTEMS.org has support for the Pi so that gives you the FOSS RTOS you want. We welcome improvements.
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.
I have the same setup however didn't tinker with it for dirty power offs. Never had an issue with corrupted files. Of course usually when I turn the TV off, the pi is at bash, so not really doing anything.
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.
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.
You got one already - element14?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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'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 read the article's comments, The Register broke the NDA by releasing the article before the announcement.
As a result they got all the facts wrong, and made you look bad.
Btw, the Neon support in this chip makes it 20x faster at code that makes use of it (multithreaded video processing, for example), which is a nice boost.
I was hoping for native SATA or USB3 or a faster GPU, but it's $35 and the most supported ARM board on the planet...
Broadcom have released the register level specs of the VideoCore IV, and an open (ARM space) driver is being worked on.
But tbh the VideoCore IV was designed from the ground up for embedded firmware use like this, it's a full CPU as well as a GPU, and it takes load off of the CPU. However now there are four cores it's less of an issue, and of course it makes the GPU very upgradeable.
Quad-A7 isn't too bad for $35 in my opinion. But the 12 GFLOPS GPU isn't very exciting (I was hoping that the RPi upgrade would also upgrade this aspect).
I suspect that Broadcom have given up on VideoCore development in the face of the competition, and will be licensing GPUs in the future from ARM/Img, etcc.
Yes they are. Most multimedia processing is parallelizable, and thus benefits greatly from SIMD instructions - for example, just about every CPU-based video codec ever. If you want an actual example, I wrote a high-performance edge detection algorithm for laser tracing, with its convolution cores written in optimized in SSE2 assembly, and am hoping to write a NEON version. It'll never run reasonably on the original Raspberry Pi because it's too underpowered to do it without SIMD (I didn't even bother writing a plain C version of the cores, because honestly any platforms without SSE2 or NEON are going to be too slow to use anyway).
Obviously you can use SIMD instructions for a lot more, but multimedia is the obvious example. And as I mentioned, the Pi makes up for it for standard codecs only with its GPU blob decoder, but that doesn't help you with anything that isn't video decoding (e.g. filtering).
Most ARM SoCs advertising high clock speeds are actually advertising max turbo speeds - just because that TV stick is saying it's running at 2GHz doesn't mean it gets there often.
Turbo is a great thing, but it's not for long workloads, it's for "race to sleep" workloads.
This is a $5 SoC, so you've got to expect some reduction in specifications given the rest of the board, and the large amount of support for the ecosystem.
People have said this new Pi is overclockable to 1100MHz too, more seems likely (very early days).
The Raspberry Pi's primary design goal was to be low cost.
Well, no. If its primary design goal was simply to be low cost, any pebble would do. Very low cost, those.
The Raspberry Pi's primary design goal was to err on the side of cost while maximizing compute power per dollar in a small form factor that enables hobbyist and amateur electronics experimentation.
The choice of this dated ARM architecture does not optimally advance that actual goal as well as some more modern choices might have.
Why bother denying this when it is true enough that a stroll through Shenzen can prove it beyond a doubt?
Found this...
http://makezine.com/2015/02/02...
The new BCM2836 SoC is more or less the old BCM2835 with the ARMv6 core cut out and a v7 quad core dropped in it’s place. However there are some other minor changes can you talk about those?
There aren’t any changes to the USB subsystem, but the power system has received a tweak. 2835 has an on-board SMPS: this wasn’t large enough to supply the current needed by the quad Cortex complex, so it was removed, and Pi 2 uses an external SMPS chip. Also, as the Cortex complex has its own 512KB L2 cache, we no longer use the 128KB system L2 — ARM traffic goes directly to SDRAM instead.
They just said that for custom codecs, SIMD is useful. There is nothing untrue about that.
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
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.
also, look at voyage linux for ideas on how to mount things RO. you can turn power off on voyage and it won't matter. its a bit of a hassle to add pkgs to and to keep it inline with voyage's ideas, but for an embedded player, its not a bad starting point.
voyage just announced they plan to work with the pi (arm), too.
and voyage does not use systemd!!!! (at least I don't think they do; it would make no sense for them, either, as they truly are embedded and not a multiuser host)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
link?
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)
Parallelizability and SIMD are completely different things.
Sorry, I don't believe you. You come over as a complete troll.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
I'm aware the register spec was open up -- sadly performance still sucks, and there are tons of bugs.
i.e.
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wik...
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.
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?
but microsoft sells that
well, it sure is heavier than say a Lua vm and libraries at under half a meg, or c. but then SoC these days are having 256M or more of memory and you can have gigs on a flash drive, maybe my brain is just old fashioned.
heh, i'm not a Rails fan either, some nice Python web frameworks out there...
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...
> The Raspberry Pi 3 in 2017 or so should be pretty amazing, ...
Link / details please?
When the B+/A+ was announced/released they said that would be the last revision until 2017 which would probably be a substantial redesign. I would google for articles about the announcement of the B+ they have a couple quotes about 2017 being the timeframe of the next version. They didn't specifically call it the "Pi 3" but I would imagine that's the naming convention they end up with.
moox. for a new generation.
It looks like the 2017 "revamp" got "bumped" to 2015.
The ODROID C1 looks interesting ... Quad Core 1.5 GHz ARM A5; even includes a RTC. Benchmarks looks like it is about 8x .. not bad. I see a PSP emulator is available too.
* http://www.hardkernel.com/main...
* http://hardkernel.com/main/pro...
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