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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+."
Man, you guys sure do edit harshly =p I don't see a word I wrote in there.
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.
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.
Android has an NDK to develop native apps that target the CPU instruction set directly. Unreal Engine for Android isn't written in Java.
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.
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.
They arent, Its 4x A7 with Neon this time.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
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).
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
Man, you need to refill that xanex prescription soon.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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. :)
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.
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
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
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.
They released all the docs for the GPU, drivers are on their way http://dri.freedesktop.org/wik... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Did anyone notice this: http://dev.windows.com/en-us/featured/raspberrypi2support
Apperantly at zero cost... Might get interesting...
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.
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.
*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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.