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Raspberry Pi Upgrades Compute Module With 10 Times the CPU Performance (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the new-and-improved dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is getting a big upgrade, with the same processor used in the recently released Raspberry Pi 3. The Compute Module, which is intended for industrial applications, was first released in April 2014 with the same CPU as the first-generation Raspberry Pi. The upgrade announced today has 1GB of RAM and a Broadcom BCM2837 processor that can run at up to 1.2GHz. "This means it provides twice the RAM and roughly ten times the CPU performance of the original Compute Module," the Raspberry Pi Foundation announcement said. This is the second major version of the Compute Module, but it's being called the "Compute Module 3" to match the last flagship Pi's version number. The new Compute Module has more flexible storage options than the original. "One issue with the [Compute Module 1] was the fixed 4GB of eMMC flash storage," the announcement said. But some users wanted to add their own flash storage. "To solve this, two versions of the [Compute Module 3] are being released: one with 4GB eMMC on-board and a 'Lite' model which requires the user to add their own SD card socket or eMMC flash." The core module is tiny so that it can fit into other hardware, but for development purposes there is a separate I/O board with GPIO, USB and MicroUSB, CSI and DSI ports for camera and display boards, HDMI, and MicroSD. The Compute Module 3 and the lite version cost $30 and $25, respectively.

71 comments

  1. Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So how long does it really take to get a raspberry PI up to emulating a nintendo and is it as nice to work with? I'd prefer to just buy the nintendo version. Dunno how long that is going to be. There is also apparently a super nintendo version coming out.

    1. Re: Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Raspberry Pi one can easily emulate Nintendo. I have Emulation Station/RetroPie running on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it runs NES, SNES, SEGA all fine. Even works for some N64 games pretty well.

    2. Re:Nintendo EMU by pr0fessor · · Score: 1

      The pie 3b about an hour and a half or 15 minutes the second time to stick the pie in a case w/heatsink plug into hdmi and peripherals write the retropie image to an sd card boot the thing up and configure it.... (it's mostly configured just out of the package not including getting roms copied to it) it does all of the nintendos up to n64 very well along with the older stuff atari, mame, celecovision, etc... (if you have a lot of roms you may also want to look into sselp/scraper on git hub)
      if you have trouble with sound from the hdmi... https://www.raspberrypi.org/do...

      It also runs good with raspbian, it would easily make a good little general purpose computer for checking email, facebook, streaming video or music. OSMC works good on the pie 3b and is a snap to configure also.

      I can't wait for the next version.... I hope it has more ram.

    3. Re:Nintendo EMU by omnichad · · Score: 1

      Depends on how accurate you want it to be. If it's very close to accurate, it'll take several more generations.

      http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

    4. Re:Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      So how long does it really take to get a raspberry PI up to emulating a nintendo and is it as nice to work with?

      It took me about 6 hours.

      That was:
      - about 5 minutes to download retropie
      - about 2 minutes to write the image to an SD card
      - about 5 minutes to do first boot and get the pi on my wifi
      - about 1 hour to download the full tosec ROM packs for NES, snes, sms, gbc, gba, atari (2600+7800), and tg16
      - about 4 hours to convince Windows to ungzip the individually gzip'ed ROM files using 7zip on the command line and delete the archives, while sorting out only ROMs with a "[!]" marker in the file name (aka "known good and latest version") and deleting the rest
      - about 30 minutes to copy the ROMs over wifi to the retropie system in their respective emulator ROM dirs

      If you already have your ROMs stored locally in uncompressed format, that should cut the entire process down to under an hour.

      Of course officially you should only be downloading ROMs of games you already own on cartridge if you want the whole thing to be legal. But I'm not your mom :P

    5. Re: Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Raspberry Pi one can easily emulate Nintendo. I have Emulation Station/RetroPie running on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it runs NES, SNES, SEGA all fine. Even works for some N64 games pretty well.

      Hell, I've had a Raspberry Pi one emulate a frickin' IBM System/370 mainframe.

      And it probably runs faster than the original did!

    6. Re: Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You RPi can emulate a 370 cpu. It can't emulate a 370 backplane, nor ge close to it's i/o throughput.

    7. Re:Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      that article is 6 years old dude, it already has been several more generations since then. in your case, the future is now!

    8. Re: Nintendo EMU by amiga3D · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There's a torrent for a 128GB sd image that has damn near every game ever made for NES, SNES and a bunch of other old consoles on it. I downloaded it and after writing it to a card I booted and was playing games a few minutes later. It's so easy it's almost stupid. Rpi3 is great until you get to N64 and dreamcast stuff. That's asking a little too much although some of the N64 games seem playable. Earlier than N64 and it's no problem at all. Haven't tried overclocking it yet.

    9. Re: Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dude. Seriously? The 370 had a memory capacity of 240KB with a maximum data throughput of 2.4 MB/s -- about 20 Mbps. Yeah, the rpi kicks its butt in all respects.

      https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3135.html

      *Any* computer from the 1970s will be blown away by the cheapest computers today.

    10. Re: Nintendo EMU by gravewax · · Score: 2

      perhaps you are confusing one of the more modern variants with the 370. the 370 backplane could not come close to even to the I/O throughput of a Pi. but that is hardly surprising given it is over 40 years old.

    11. Re: Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wonder can you just throw a heat sink on and over clock the crap out of this thing? Or is there more to it?

    12. Re:Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lets say you automatically boot to emulator, how quickly does it boot up from cold start?

    13. Re: Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seed ya scurvy land luvva!
      Seed!

    14. Re: Nintendo EMU by Grench · · Score: 3, Informative

      They can be overclocked. The Raspberry Pi 3 has a newer ARMv8 SoC which runs a bit hotter than the previous SoCs they have used.

      I'm going through this process at the moment; I have a Pi3 in the official Pi case running Lakka (an OpenELEC distro with RetroArch on top of it, designed exclusively for emulating a fair number of classic systems).

      Like other people, I've found the Pi3 is perfect for emulating 8-bit, 16-bit, and some 32-bit consoles, but struggles a bit with some - Atari Jaguar and Sega Saturn seem to be way too slow to use, while N64 is just a bit too slow. PS1 emulation works pretty well, but gets choppy in some places.

      I want to overclock my Pi3, so I have bought and fitted some heatsinks (one to the SoC and one to the USB hub/Ethernet controller chip). I have drilled ventilation holes in the underside of the case to allow cool air to get in to the RAM chip, which sits on the underside of the board. I have drilled ventilation holes in the lid of the case, along with holes to allow me to fit a 30mm 5v cooling fan. Then I fitted such a fan, and found it to be the loudest, whiniest, most irritating sound in the world. So I threw it away and have ordered a 40mm 5v fan from a company who specialize in making silent PCs instead.

      --
      He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
    15. Re: Nintendo EMU by Grench · · Score: 3, Informative

      Oh, forgot to mention - Lakka includes plug-and-play drivers for various game console controllers. I use my PlayStation 3 DualShock controller with it; absolutely zero setup required. You need to connect it up wired at least once, but then you can configure it to use the controller wirelessly (Pi3 has built in WiFi and Bluetooth, but older Pi units would need to have USB dongles to replicate the same functionality).

      Lakka can also use ROMs and BIN/CUE files that have been shared from a NAS, but it does require a teeny little bit of command line usage to do.

      --
      He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
    16. Re: Nintendo EMU by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      I'm up to a 1.5 ratio on it now. Not going much past 2 to 1 so you better get after it.

    17. Re:Nintendo EMU by omnichad · · Score: 1

      And Retropie still doesn't use higan - mostly forks of Snes9x, which is not accurate at all.

      The future is now if you're buying a commodity PC, not a low-powered ARM CPU.

    18. Re: Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > I've found the Pi3 is perfect for emulating 8-bit, 16-bit, and some 32-bit consoles

      Remember the Neo-Geo?

      That had a 68000 and a Z80, so it was advertised as a "24-bit" system. <g>

    19. Re: Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's solid state, so maybe put it in a bucket of mineral oil.

    20. Re:Nintendo EMU by Grench · · Score: 1

      I haven't tried Retropie, I use Lakka (which runs on OpenELEC and runs Retroarch as the UI) and the Pi3 boots to UI in under 10 seconds from cold.

      --
      He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
    21. Re: Nintendo EMU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You have a magnet hash?

  2. 4FB Flash? by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

    I don't understand the rational behind a 4GB flash card? My rpi has a 64GB USB drive. Maybe speed perhaps (?), but even with going through USB it has enough throughout for almost any application in its class.

    1. Re:4FB Flash? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Maybe it's the sweet spot? You may need 64 GB of storage but how many people would actually need something like that in a small embedded module like this?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:4FB Flash? by omnichad · · Score: 1

      This is for embedded use, mostly - and it's soldered on. Even the summary says they're now offering the choice of expandable storage.

    3. Re:4FB Flash? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SATA is the answer. Add SATA and we can replace laptops, desktops, entertainment systems, etc. The choke point of any platform is the hard drive performance. An SSD would make the Pi roar (Not through a USB port).

      Until then the GPIO pins are so fascinating that my Pi collects dust when it is not being used for an electronics project. That is about 98% of the time.

    4. Re:4FB Flash? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "rationale", not "rational".

    5. Re:4FB Flash? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The main issue with the raspberry it's that it's trying to be both a computer and an electronics platform.
      It's priced low to compete with MCU-based platforms even if most people that buy it never touch the GPIOs.
      It looks like you'll still need to use some other chinese board if you want dedicated SATA and Ethernet ports

      The choke point of any platform is the hard drive performance.

      No, fuck off with this rubbish, even with the slowest IDE drives though an USB 1 converter I/O isn't an issue unless the system runs short of RAM.

    6. Re:4FB Flash? by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      I'd say 16GB is the sweet spot. Those cards cost almost nothing now. I store most stuff on USB flash drives now or just stream over the network. The PI2 and 3 are fast enough to be useful. I now have the older original Pi boards retired to security camera duty.

    7. Re:4FB Flash? by amiga3D · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's a hobbyist board. It's okay to use as a computer but really I can pick up old junk 10 year old laptops at garage sales for 25 bucks that'll run rings around it. I have one set up with a desktop just to play around and it's maybe a slow P3 speed. It runs the raspbian pixel desktop pretty snappy though if you don't push too hard. I've had it choke a few times on too many open programs. It's amazing for what it is.

    8. Re:4FB Flash? by Threni · · Score: 2

      Oh great! 4, 64 and 16gb are all sweet spots? Any more? I love opinions!

    9. Re:4FB Flash? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Cards perhaps don't. I don't know about onboard chips, though.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    10. Re:4FB Flash? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Interesting

      and it's maybe a slow P3 speed.

      That sounds fishy, though. Even though the 1+ GHz A53 cores could be substantially worse per-clock than the P3 - I doubt that, though -, there's still four of them. The average total performance should be quite a bit higher.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    11. Re:4FB Flash? by houghi · · Score: 1

      640K should be enough for everybody.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    12. Re:4FB Flash? by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      It's a moving target as the price on storage tumbles.

    13. Re:4FB Flash? by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      640K was never enough. Not even when that quote was made.

    14. Re:4FB Flash? by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      Try doing work on it. The graphics are pretty fast but using pypar2 on it or any type of compression software and it starts to lug pretty hard.

    15. Re:4FB Flash? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Setting aside whether the quote is apocryphal (probably is), in 1981 when people ran single-tasking DOS and apps were typically no bigger than 64k, it was certainly more than enough "for anyone." It was an almost outrageous amount of memory.

      But software expands to fill available RAM, so that didn't last long.

    16. Re:4FB Flash? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      That all depends on what work you were doing. If your work was too hard for an old P3 then yes it would start to lug. If on the other hand computers didn't become useful only with the release of the i7 then you'll find a RPi 3 can beat any old P3 in most tasks, including computing checksums if that is your thing.

      For most people that is not their thing.

    17. Re:4FB Flash? by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      You might be right but not by much. The Pi3 is 2441 MIPS vs Pentium III 600mhz at 2054 MIPS. The Pi3 is clocked at 1200mhz with 4 cores so it's an interesting comparison. The last Pentium III I had was 1ghz and it really seemed faster than the Pi3 but that's been so long I can't say for sure. It was an IBM thinkpad and I just tossed it about a year ago even though the damn thing still worked. You've made me curious so I'm going to see what I've got I can compare it to and run some tests like ripping mp3s and stuff like that. Fun times.

  3. Sill only usb bus for storage, networking, etc? by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    Sill only usb bus for storage, networking, etc?

    1. Re:Sill only usb bus for storage, networking, etc? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's also an SDIO interface, which is what the wi-fi chip attaches to on the Raspberry Pi 3.

    2. Re:Sill only usb bus for storage, networking, etc? by amiga3D · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes. It's a hobbyist board not a workhorse. Considering it's limitations it's amazing what people are doing with them. It's bringing the creativeness out in people.

  4. Re:But it's not a murkan by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 0

    Chill out. The processor is (was) American (now Singapore)

  5. Uses? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The article shows a picture of it being used in the back of an NEC monitor.

    Are there any other examples of industrial controls or places that these live?

    1. Re:Uses? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      People have made media players / set top boxes out of them. I believe it has the same exact foot print as the last one, and they say they will stick to it into the future, so you can make a devices where you can 'upgrade' it.

      This seems to be targeted at people making mid-size production runs of products, probably in the range of 100's or 1000's that aren't big enough to bother with designing custom board, but might need a few custom things on its own mother board.

    2. Re:Uses? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

      The company I work for uses a similar device in a tablet computer (really more of a brick computer, but anyway)... At the time it was developed the Pi Compute didn't exist, which is unfortunately because they one we have turned out to be a pain in the arse.

      They are likely to be used in a lot of industrial applications where the designer doesn't want to build and support their own ARM system and software environment, they just want something they can plug in and run an OS on out of the box, with a few peripherals of their own.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  6. Beowulf by MrCreosote · · Score: 1

    But can you run a Beowulf cluster on it?

    --
    MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
    1. Re:Beowulf by godrik · · Score: 2

      yes you can build a beowulf cluster of it. It was done on previous generation of r-pi.

      http://www.zdnet.com/article/b...

    2. Re:Beowulf by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      I'm sure you could run some hot grids on it.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  7. Broadcom dependency? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does anyone else on this planet find it weird that Broadcom is the one and only supplier for this "revolution"? Holy shit people are stupid!

    1. Re:Broadcom dependency? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Any other SoC provider is free to offer a comparable cheap option. Let me know when that happens, OK?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:Broadcom dependency? by geoskd · · Score: 3, Informative

      Any other SoC provider is free to offer a comparable cheap option. Let me know when that happens, OK?

      TI does

      Samsung does

      There are a Whole slew of them

      --
      I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
    3. Re:Broadcom dependency? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Sort of comparable. Single-core Cortex-A8 is roughly what you had with the original RPi. Quad core Cortex-A9 is nicer but I bet you still get shitty firmware for it - that seems to be not just the norm but rather the ubiquitous default. When I said "SoC providers are free to offer a comparable cheap option", I also meant opening the software so that it could be used for something else than running Android. RPi people have so far been pressing hard for the graphics to work in things that aren't Android, for example.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    4. Re:Broadcom dependency? by geoskd · · Score: 1

      I would suggest reconsidering the BeagleBone. Although not well advertised, it also contains two dedicated 200MHz cores that have full access to the main memory, and IO space as well as having their own cache. Unless you absolutely need 4 full cores of a Pi2/Pi3, I think you will find the BBB to be an excellent choice. It is also 100% open. I have a copy of the PCB designs tucked away and if it ever becomes necessary, I can have justa bout any PCB shop make them for me.

      Also get a look at that last list, there are a bunch of options all over the spectrum of price, CPU performance and IO options, so there is likely to be something for everyone.

      I would also like to note that the RPi foundation has caused me personal grief once already by EOLing the original Pi B and B+. We used to use hundreds of those things, but when they stopped making them, we had to switch to the Pi2 / Pi3. For most things that isn't a big deal, but these were part of a CE compliant device, and when we switched to the Pi3 we had to redo the compliance which cost $220K. We use about 5,000 per year, so it effectively added $40 to every unit we sell if we amortize it over a single year. Pretty shitty deal. All of our new designs are dual use, so we can continue using the Pi3s, but when they get EOLed, we are going BBB, or whatever they come out with for the next rev. In short, the RPi is a neat toy, but that is all it will ever be. There are plenty of other options that are in it for the long haul.

      --
      I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
  8. 4GB is 20 copies of Red Hat Linux by raymorris · · Score: 1

    Red Hat Linux and CentOS require at least 200MB of disk space. The smaller Pi option has 20 times that. It can hold 20 separate installations of Linux. Often, that's enough. When it's not, use an SD card.

    Looking at it another way, for some projects I choose between an Arduino and a Pi. If it's too big for the Arduino, I use a Pi. Some projects are borderline, things that *could* be done with an Arduino, but it would be a stretch. The Arduino 32K-256K of storage. So the Pi has several thousand times as much.

    1. Re:4GB is 20 copies of Red Hat Linux by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      But what's the advantage with a SIMM?

    2. Re:4GB is 20 copies of Red Hat Linux by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Mechanically, cheap standardized connectivity, I'd think.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  9. Better than a cable box by omnichad · · Score: 1

    These are still better specs than your average, slow as molasses cable box.

    1. Re:Better than a cable box by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Funny you should say that...
      Broadcom used this chip, and the chip in the original RaspberryPi as the basis of their cable boxes.
      They had a really nice internal software stack for it too.

  10. Re:But it's not a murkan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ARM was British, now Japanese.

  11. Lite Model and "soldering gurus" by psergiu · · Score: 1

    I'm waiting for the "soldering gurus" who were screaming why the original RPi was not sold cheaper in component kit form to get the Lite model and solder their eMMCs on those empry BGA pads.

    I remember all the boasting about them reflowing huge multilayer PCBs in their kitchen oven.

    --
    1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
    1. Re: Lite Model and "soldering gurus" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's gotten you so angry?

    2. Re: Lite Model and "soldering gurus" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's gotten you so angry?

      He's just pissed that Trump apparently lied to his voters. They though all the other lies he told were the only lies. That all the other people he cheated for personal gain after "partnering" with them were suckers. That Trump would respect the people that voted for him and put him in a position to screw them over too, but that THIS TIME he wouldn't betray everyone in the deal. They though they would get a golden shower of wealth and prosperity. That Trump would stand over them and shield them from the waste. Instead, they're getting soaked and feel like they might have made a mistake.

    3. Re: Lite Model and "soldering gurus" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You wish, Hill shill. KYS.

  12. Re:But it's not a murkan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The chips the Broadcom originally based the RaspberryPi from were designed in Cambridge, England.

  13. Not an industrial ready solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Pi is far far away from an industrial platform....... I would not like to be around a plant which is running on a Pi...

  14. I guess I'll have to wait for Pi4 by JustNiz · · Score: 0

    Sigh it can only decode 1080p H.264/MPEG-4 at 30fps?

    I guess I'll have to wait for at least another generation before I get my mythtv client.

  15. Good enough for a Plex server? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I tried using a Raspberry Pi 2 for a Plex server, it did not have enough power.

    Would this do it?

  16. Re:But it's not a murkan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's not Scottish, so it's CRAP!