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+."

Comments

Editing

[MicroHex]

Man, you guys sure do edit harshly =p I don't see a word I wrote in there.

Re:Editing

[Anonymous Coward]

The editors run all submissions through three rounds of Google translate (Ukrainian to Korean to Swahili) then translate the output back to English. Dice Holdings considers this editorial technique their second greatest achievement. Blashdot Seta is their crowning achievement.

naming scheme is going to drive people to drink

[SuperBanana]

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?

It's about time

[kriston]

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.

Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU

[YukariHirai]

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.

USB dropout is a BCM2835 fault, not fixable

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What about the GPU?

[ssam]

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

Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU

[Simon Brooke]

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.