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Raspberry Pi Upgrades Compute Module With 10 Times the CPU Performance (arstechnica.com)
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.
ARM was British, now Japanese.
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
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
The chips the Broadcom originally based the RaspberryPi from were designed in Cambridge, England.
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.
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.
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