Raspberry Pi 3 Rolls Out With Faster CPU, On-Board Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth

An anonymous reader writes: The original Raspberry Pi went on sale four years ago, and more than 8,000,000 units have shipped since then. Raspberry Pi computers are used in schools and universities, in factories and other industrial applications, in home automation and hobby projects, and much more. Today the Raspberry Pi 3 was announced, featuring a 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, making it roughly 10x the speed of the original Pi 1. Many people will be pleased to hear that the Raspberry Pi 3 also features on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, greatly improving the device's connectivity. The new device goes on sale today at the usual price of US $35. (Here's the official announcement itself.)

Comments

Awesome

[jason777]

The price is right. Its game over now to get literally anything online. I'm building an interface for my garage doors. Also, I still cant get my hands on a pi zero.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I still cant get my hands on a pi zero.

Try Coke Zero. Available at any grocery store.

Re:Awesome

[silas_moeckel]

Try an ESP 8266 for interfacing a garage door you need what a few inputs and a handful of outputs?

Re:Awesome

[Thanshin]

Also, I still cant get my hands on a pi zero.

Check your retailer. You can get a zero for every two PI.

R.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

comma (noun)
1. a punctuation mark (,) indicating a pause between parts of a sentence or separating items in a list.

Re: Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically the GL-inet 6416 has dual ethernet, 2.4GHz wifi, one USB socket, a MIPS processor (Atheros AR9330) with 64 megabytes of RAM and 16 megabytes of flash, and 5 easily accessible GPIOs. It's not much, but it's good cheap fun.

Re:Awesome

[ThosLives]

You don't need a computer at all for garage doors. And technically you don't even need electricity either, although I do admit that automatic garage door openers do make life easier.

As an added bonus, if you have a manual garage door, you don't have weird failure modes or resetting the manual release if there is a power outage.

Re:Awesome

[shortscruffydave]

Check your retailer. You can get a zero for every two PI.

YMMV - for two Pi I get 6.283185307179586476925286766559

Re:Awesome

[LWATCDR]

For a basic door opener yes but maybe they want it to include a BLE interface to the cell phone or even using the camera and Open CV to have it identify the car and automatically close the door.
It really depends on the feature set you want but the ESP 8266 could do a simple open the door when you use an app on your smartphone.

Re:Awesome

[Richard Dick Head]

Ugh...you meatspace engineers and your radians, butchering the beauty and purity of geometry. Clearly you've never enjoyed a spherical hamburger of uniform density in a vaccum.

Re:Awesome

[spire3661]

If you are going the ESP8266 route, go to Adafruit, they have it mounted on some interesting breakout boards that make life easy.

Re:Awesome

[KingBozo]

Really you put your garage door on the internet, well it is now open, better check it and shut it.

Re:Awesome

[110010001000]

The glinet one I was talking about. Works great for small projects and has proper ethernet.

Re:Awesome

[silas_moeckel]

The ESP 8266 is more than capable of integrating with higher level controllers. BTLE is not realy in it's bag of tricks, wifi obviously is. In my case higher level app is tracking phones to open up when I am about to pull into the driveway. Though I use a off the shelf bit to interface with the garage door (myq gateway) to keep my insurance guy happy.

Re:Awesome

[Gaygirlie]

No, where did you read that the ESP8266 only has 1 GPIO? That's totally incorrect, it has 11 GPIO and you can have 2 more if you get one of the modules where two of the pins going to the flash - chip are cut or you cut them yourself for a total of 13 GPIO - pins. There is also one analog input pin. Also, you can run a web-interface on them, if you want to.

I have several ESP8266's myself and they are fabulous little devices and perfect for uses like this because they are so small, they use very little power and the built-in WiFi means you don't need any dongles or anything like that to make network-connected sensors and controllers. I have a small 2.8" colour LCD with touchscreen connected to an ESP with temperature/humidity - sensor, a PIR motion - sensor and a few more sensors in my use, and it works great.

Re:Awesome

[silas_moeckel]

There are a lot of breakouts for the chip, Something like an adafruit hazzah gets you 9 gpio's, flexible power input (though not like a usb wall wart is hard). As to positioning standard security system magnetic reeds for garage doors work well.

If you have a chamberlain or any of the the other brand names that uses the same kit the myq gateway gets you all that and integrates well with full home automation bits has a stand alone phone app as well. For me that coupled with openhab got me what I wanted. Garage door opens, lights come on if appropriate etc when I turn into my driveway and the opposite when I leave.

Re:Awesome

[kamaaina]

Will it to https or some other secure type of encryption over the Internet? I mean we all been talking about how IoT stuff is insecure.

Re:Awesome

[fyngyrz]

What's your angle, buddy?

Ethernet

[arth1]

But still the same ethernet that goes over the USB bus?

Re:Ethernet

[Christian Smith]

But still the same ethernet that goes over the USB bus?

And? A 100Mbps ethernet interface is fine over the 480 Mbps USB2 bus. You're not going to be running an enterprise NAS on this thing now, are you?

The original USB ethernet had problems with the poly-fuses blowing out under load. That's not a problem now with later Pis.

Re:Ethernet

[fisted]

The original USB ethernet had problems with the poly-fuses blowing out under load. That's not a problem now with later Pis.

Different problem. That was about the raspi resetting.

The throughput is still shit, a theoretical maximum of 480Mbps notwithstanding.

Re: Ethernet

[techabuse]

I am imagining! No firmware update signing, open ports out the wazoo, HELLO packets streaming out on every interface at boot to request config, and highly specific strings in the network traffic for the local LEO to look for. Might as well call the cops on yourself.

Re:Ethernet

[fisted]

I just clarified that the GP was conflating two distinct problems.
However, since you asked, you need to take into account that the NIC might not even have the entire USB for itself. For instance, I use one raspi as a wifi access point (hostapd on NetBSD), bridged to my wired network. So everything going through it effectively visits the USB twice. I don't think I have ever seen higher throughputs than around 5Mbps for any traffic going through it.

But even if the USB is passed only once, as in the following test that doesn't involve any wifi/sd card access/cpu load:

# rsync rather than scp to avoid CPU load due to compression/encryption
# destination is /tmp, which is a ramdisk to avoid sd card accesses
$ rsync -v 16M pi:/tmp/
16M

sent 16,781,387 bytes received 35 bytes 1,459,254.09 bytes/sec
total size is 16,777,216 speedup is 1.00

That is 11.6 Mbps, on an 100Mbps wired link with only one otherwise idle 100Mbps switch inbetween, with cat.6 cabling

Re:Ethernet

[hankwang]

rsync rather than scp to avoid CPU load due to compression/encryption

Unless you're using a customized ssh server and client with a "null" cipher, rsync will run over an encrypted ssh connection. If you want to see raw network throughput, you should use netcat:

pi@pi$ nc -k -l 12345 > /dev/null

john@laptop$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/stdout bs=1M count=16 | nc ip.address.of.raspberry 12345

in bed with satan

[nimbius]

BCM43438 wireless âoecomboâ chip.

Kill yourself. As a veteran Linux sysadmin seeing BCM in the lsmod or lspci for ANY machine is enough to make me dive out a window and head for the hills. Broadcom wireless --christ even broadcom wired -- is a whole other level of shit-tier performance in Linux. enjoy your frozen interfaces and unsupported modes.

To the Pi team: Why god why couldnt you have chosen something like an Intel or atheros?

Re:in bed with satan

[bigdady92]

The founder of Pi worked at Broadcom, Broadcom gave them buttloads of code and chips for next to nothing, therefore it made 100% sense to build a board that is simple and easy to use based on this type of cheap and well known tech. Broadcom is using the Pi as a springboard into other projects using the whole Razor vs. Razor Blade methodology of sales. Broadcom may be making very thin margins but they are still making some profit on the chips and boards.

Intel already tried build a Pi type board, it doesn't have anywhere near the amount of applications the Pi does so why bother using it?

Re:in bed with satan

[AmiMoJo]

To the Pi team: Why god why couldnt you have chosen something like an Intel or atheros?

Cost, and extra work to integrate with the Broadcom SoC they use. Broadcom give you everything you need to plug their chips together for free, where as if you want to mix and match you are on your own design wide. If you look at the RPi schematic it's basically the Broadcom minimal example from the datasheet, with a voltage regulator and some ports.

Re:in bed with satan

[HannethCom]

The Raspberry Pi team were going for cheap platform that could be affordable to schools, hobby projects and used in developing nations.
When the Raspberry Pi first rolled out the processor was about $5, that left $30 for everything else.
At that time Intel SOC were going for $35 in bulk, which would have made the Raspberry Pi at least $65. The original Intel chips used during development would have been even more expensive.

Other people have pointed out that the founder worked at Broadcom.

I can't comment on the atheros as I do not know much about it, what the cost was when the first Pi came out, or even if it existed when the first Pi came out.

Re:Imagine playing Halo in HD on Raspberry Pi 3

[Crowd Computing]

With the Raspberry Pi 3 and Windows 10, you can play all Windows games in full HD for only $35!

Feeding the troll: theoretically this will only work for Windows games that have been ported to the ARM architecture. So in theory you could play some WinPhone apps.

Re:If it ain't broke, don't fix it

[RabidReindeer]

IDE?

Even the last couple of desktop motherboards I've bought don't do IDE anymore. Strictly SATA.

Realistically, the Pi is OK for casual computing and as a mount-anywhere smart controller/interface, but if you need serious storage, network that sucker into a SAN.

Re:Hype?

[Crowd Computing]

These two sentences alone make me chose any of the innumerable competitor products, rather than R-Pi.

It's funny how people go on about "competitor products" but never bother naming them.

Probably because whenever they do, it turns out that they're either not comparable on price or on specs.

Actually there are many Chinese ARM-based development boards and "mini PCs" with much, much better specs. The problem is that they tend to use SoCs designed by some mainland Chinese semiconductor company which refuse, or at least ignore requests, to release even the GPL'ed kernel sources for the chip. Compared to these companies, Broadcom is almost saintly.

Please give us 64-bit OS, too

[m.alessandrini]

They say they are investigating if it's worth porting raspbian to 64 bits. I'd say: YES! What's the point in having a 64-bit CPU if you cannot exploit it fully?

Re:Please give us 64-bit OS, too

[Anonymous Coward]

^ exactly this.

Where isn't there a 4 GB RAM or 8 GB RAM option ??

One of the RasPi Foundation staff on the official website comments said that there is some sort of architectural limitation with Videocore 4 which Broadcom builds into the SoC that prevents them from moving past 1GB. They can't get around that without swapping SoC supplier, which they seem very reluctant to do.

Re:Please give us 64-bit OS, too

[psergiu]

VideoCore4 cannot access more than 1Gb of RAM
And on the RPi, VC4 acts like a Northbridge - the ARM cores will do all RAM and IO access trough the VC4.
So unless Boradcom updates VideoCore with more address lines, All RPis will have max 1Gb or RAM.

So?

[goombah99]

But still the same ethernet that goes over the USB bus?

You complain about this like it's a show stopping defect. For the few people who care about this, then there's alternatives to rasp PI. But for the vast majority of people, empirically, this is not a problem. Given the Raspi only has a gigbyte of memory or half that, where the heck are you going to put your data after 10 seconds at a gigabit?

Next you will complain your toaster having only 10Mb/set wifi is a major lifestyle issue.

Re:So?

[KingBozo]

Hey when the whole family is watching the toaster from their phones to see who is first to get the eggo waffle, 10Mb/sec is just to slow. I could completely miss the eggo popping up and my kids get it first.

Sold Out Already

[boley1]

Once again demand outstrips supply.

Re:Banana Pi or Raspberry Pi?

[Cpt_Kirks]

Banana Pi has SATA built in, and is faster.

Though, it is a bit trickier to code for.

Re:Anyone have a pointer to a device...

[bitingduck]

for $100 that's not easy. less than $200 and it starts to be reasonable. Logicsupply.com has some compact boards that are inexpensive and capable.

Re:Anyone have a pointer to a device...

[spire3661]

Try an Intel NUC. I use the latest 14nm version with OpenElec/XBMC installed as my everyday HTPC. I even used a 2 GB stick of ram to keep costs low. I boot mine off the SD card slot, because i dont have a lot of card access beside boot up. You have sata and m.2 inside if you want it.

This particular NUC
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-NU...
is the dividing line between x86-64 and ARM at the low power end. Compared to the Pi, its expensive, but its robust feature set makes up for it. I use and recommend both NUCs and Pis. The NUC5 series even has GPIO.

http://www.intel.com/content/w...