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Raspberry Pi Becomes Third Best-Selling General Purpose Computer of All Time, Beating Commodore 64 (raspberrypi.org)
The Raspberry Pi has outsold the Commodore 64 by selling north of 12.5 million boards in five years, becoming the world's third best-selling general purpose computer. "The Commodore 64, had, until recently, the distinction of being the third most popular general purpose computing platform," Eben Upton told a crowd at the fifth birthday party. "That's what I'm here to celebrate," he said, "we are now the third most popular general purpose computing platform after the Mac and PC." The MagPi Magazine reports: The Raspberry Pi Model 3 is the best-selling Raspberry Pi. This chart shows that Raspberry Pi 3 has accounted for almost a third of all Raspberry Pi boards sold. The Model 3 sits next to its immediate predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 2B+ (which has the same board shape but a slightly slower CPU). These two boards account for over half of all Raspberry Pi boards sold. The rest of the sales are between older models. The original Model A accounts for just 2 percent of sales. So keep one if you've got it as they're pretty rare. We should point out, before the Commodore fan club arrives, that there are discrepancies in the total number of sales of the C64. The 12.5 million figure comes from an analysis of serial numbers. This article by Michael Steil explains in detail why the 12.5 million number is accurate. We hold it to be the most accurate analysis of Commodore 64 sales (other opinions are available).
It seems like a bit of a stretch to call it that. There are the basic features I would consider a "General Purpose" computer to have (and, to be fair, the Raspberry Pi has many of them):
- Wall (or POE) Power Supply
- SSD/HHD (the SD Card of the Raspberry Pi could probably be considered that)
- USB Ports for Keyboard/Mouse (Raspberry Pi has that)
- Video Output (Raspberry Pi has that)
- Network Connection (Raspberry Pi has that)
- Ready to use OS (I guess Raspberry Pi could be considered to have that with Raspbian)
More philosophically, I would consider a General Purpose computer to be one that you take out of the box, plug in and turn on - the Raspberry Pi really doesn't fit that use case which makes it hard for me to consider it a "General Purpose" computer.
I would consider it to be a very successful "Custom Purpose" computer, however.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
This is 12.5 million units across how many different models of RPi? If I'm going to count all versions of RPi, what are total sales of Dell Latitude? How many total MacBooks of all versions have been sold?
Also c64 sold 12-30 million units. Creative misuse of numbers on the RPi part.
C64 was released in 1982. 1982's Cray supercomputer could do 420 million FLOPs.
Raspberry Pi's GPU can do 24 GFLOPs. That's equivalent to 57 of 1982's Cray supercomputers.
http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second lists the C64's MOS Technology 6510 @ 1 MHz as having 0.43 MIPS and 0 MFLOPS.
Note that the 6510 is an 8-bit CPU, so it would take a ton of instructions to do 32-bit IEEE floating point in software on it.
I don't know the 6510 instruction set, but it's clear that to simulate a 32-bit fused-multiply-add (FMA) instruction, you'd need at least 32 8-bit instructions.
My ballpark estimate using software floating point on C64: 24000 / 0.43 * fudge = probably at least 1.8 million C64s to equal one Raspberry pi.
p.s. If you meant power consumption: about 10 RPIs = one C64.
The Raspberry Pi is a circuit board for hobbyists --- one component of the kit of parts you'll need for various projects. The C-64 and its cassette or disk drive a home PC designed for mass market sale. No assembly required.
This! I was looking for someone to point this out... Pooling all the different versions of the Raspberry Pi together against the C64 doesn't make sense. Instead they should either have pitted the RPi against all of Commodore (including the VIC-20 and earlier, the 64, 128 and all the Amiga models), or held like the RPi 3 against the C64, which has C64 win by 3:1.