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Official, Customized Raspberry Pi Versions Coming Soon (linuxgizmos.com)
DeviceGuru writes: The immensely popular Raspberry Pi will soon be offered in customized versions, through an exclusive arrangement between Raspberry Pi Trading and Element14. According to the companies' announcement, Element14 will provide design and manufacturing services to OEM customers to create 'bespoke designs' based upon the Raspberry Pi technology platform. That's weird U.K. English for saying that contracts for creating customized Raspberry Pi SBCs will entail substantial NRE fees and 3,000 to 5,000 unit orders, depending on the nature of the customization. The tweaked Pi's are likely to have revised board layouts, additional or alternative functions, interfaces, connectors, and memory configurations, and more. A handful of unsanctioned Raspberry Pi knock-offs have already appeared over the past couple of years, including various Orange Pi and Banana Pi flavors, which certainly didn't involve any 'bespeaking.' More info is at Element14's CustomPi page.
Bespoke is not "weird UK English". It's common English and used in the USA as well, I've heard and seen American colleagues use it regularly.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
You can view videos just fine on it without paying to for a codec. now if you are trying to view an Archaic out of date and not even used anymore video Mpeg2 or VC1 using the hardware acceleration? then you pay. mplayer and VLC plays every single video format under the sun on it just fine.
Come on back when you actually know something about the Raspberry Pi and stop making things up to sound like you know what you are talking about.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The RPi 2 would have a good chance of handling gigabit if it had a proper NIC.
The cheapest NUC I can find on Amazon is around $139. The cheapest Pi I can find is $19.99 for an A, $32 for a B, and $39 for a Pi 2. At 3-7 times the cost, I don't think they are exactly competitors across the board. There is surely overlap, but that doesn't mean they will "eat the lunch" of the Pi in a space in which it does not have an offering.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They definitely have my interest, we're buying Pis and knocking off the USB connectors and replacing them with header pins for internal sensor gear that we're repackaging into a small container to resell. Thing is, right now we're moving dozens of the things (they are pretty specialized), we'd probably never be able to sell 5000.
Buy an Intel NUC if you want that. The latest 14nm NUCs are $140 on amazon right now. I have one setup using just bare OpenElec running 2 GB of Ram for $160 total. To get an RPi to that point i would need the PI, a NICE case, a power supply, SD card, IR receiver, Bluetooth and Wifi modules. Best case scenario for the PI is $30+15+7+10+8+10+10=$90 for a vastly inferior machine. Dont get me wrong i LOVE the PI 2 i have. I have 3 of them with the official Pi touchscreens, i jsut understand its limitations. They are for making terminals, not servers (for the record i ran a static website with a year uptime on an Pi no problem), For $70 more a NUC makes a VASTLY better choice.
Good-bye
But does the SoC actually have any busses other than USB to hang a 'proper NIC' from? Messing around with a goofy USB NIC would not have been the cheapest option if the SoC had an integrated NIC(or even a MAC that just needed an external PHY); but I don't think that that one does; nor does it implement a PCIe controller, so that's off the table.
Indeed, it does not seem to have anything of the sort.
I'm guessing the target devices (smartphones, etc) wouldn't need anything resembling high speed networking.
For what it's worth, the Banana Pro (half the cores, higher clock, same A7) has a gigabit NIC, and I've gotten >500Mbps with it.
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The Pi plays an HD 1080i Mpeg2 stream just fine using a software decoder. And anyone using a mythTV backend is transcoding anyways to keep space consumed down.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Their element14 custom pi web site needs to move to the 21st century - it's absolute crap on mobile, and the majority of people on the web use mobile devices.
I can guarantee you the majority of people using element14's website do so with the biggest monitor they can afford and do so while having multiple products open in multiple tabs while comparing multiple datasheets and a CAD program in the background.
This is a classic example of a well function website that definitely does NOT need a mobile friendly page.
With iperf testing, someone in that SE question reported about 94.4Mbit through the onboard LAN interface, under half of that for 802.11n over USB (44.5Mbit), and about 222Mbit over a USB3 gigabit ethernet interface. That roughly matches information that I've read in the past.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
First, the RPi2 is lower power compared even to a very new NUC. The entire RPi2 uses at maximum 420mA * 5V = 2.1W. The NUC uses between 6W and 30W.
Second, according to the summary it should be possible to add a couple of cheap chips to the RPi2 and have Gb Ethernet + SATA for a very modest increase in price. WiFi, Bluetooth, IR, etc. are totally unnecessary if all you want is a NAS or a small/cheap server. It'd be more like $60 for the mutant RPi2 vs $140 for the NUC you mentioned.
Clearly a NUC will curb-stomp an RPi2's performance. But there's definitely a "knee" to the curve between performance and price. If a mutant RPi2 can deliver the essential features at a very very low price... well, that's what the RPi is all about.