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Raspberry Pi Becomes Third Best-Selling General Purpose Computer of All Time, Beating Commodore 64 (raspberrypi.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the bronze-medal-winner dept.

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).

17 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Is it a "General Purpose Computer"? by mykepredko · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:Is it a "General Purpose Computer"? by Repentinus · · Score: 4, Informative

      A general purpose computer is simply a computer that can be used to compute any computable function when space and time constraints are ignored. Your phone is a general purpose computer. The opposite of that would be an application-specific integrated circuit or general purpose hardware locked down to running a limited set of applications.

  2. Re:Beating Commodore 64!!?! by narcc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    These numbers are crazy. They're probably counting sales and not use.

    Surely, most Pi's are just used as cheap C64 emulation machines, letting the C64 continue to reign supreme. (Those not being used as a replacement C64 are all obviously just collecting dust in a drawer.)

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  3. Open firmware by radoni · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Open firmware: https://github.com/christinaa/...

    Coders wanted. Linux bring-up is done, needs USB and display to be more useful. Discussion happens on Freenode IRC #raspberrypi-internals

    When this popular embedded platform has a fully functional open firmware to use instead of the proprietary bootcode.bin then I'll be a little more cheery about the success of the Raspberry Pi worldwide.

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  4. Best selling by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

    Not a surprise. To run win 10 you need 1000 of them.

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  5. 100% pure BULL SHIT by Jason1729 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:100% pure BULL SHIT by QuantumLeaper · · Score: 2

      The C64 also has the SX64, C128 (after all it did include the C64), 30 in one Joystick, and the C65, also I most likely missing some other versions of the C64 too. So if your going to include all the different versions of the RPi, you should all include all the different versions of the C64.

  6. Ok but... by MouseTheLuckyDog · · Score: 2

    how many C64 do you need to hook up in parralell to get the power of one Pi?

    1. Re:Ok but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  7. This is absurdly incorrect on its face by nctritech · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Commodore 64 is "the best-selling home computer of all time" which is based on the fact that the Commodore 64 is a very specific model of computer. The Raspberry Pi 3 IS NOT the same thing as a Raspberry Pi. That's like saying the Commodore 128 is the same thing as the Commodore 64. The C64C was "the same thing" as the C64 because it was a cost-reduced version that was otherwise a completely identical piece of hardware. Each RPi is a completely different computer from the core chip to the peripherals to the I/O.

    Combining all computers that are branded Raspberry Pi and saying they have sold more units combined than the Commodore 64 is one thing, but saying "The Pi has beaten the C64 as the most units of a single computer sold" is an outright lie. The Pi series is also not a computer made for general-purpose use; it's an embedded system, and by that standard I'm willing to bet that there's some model of wireless router that has sold more units than the C64; perhaps the venerable Linksys WRT54G?

    tl;dr: the C64 still holds the crown. The article is based on bullshit logic.

    1. Re:This is absurdly incorrect on its face by Titanek · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:This is absurdly incorrect on its face by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For this to be a valid challenge to the C64's record, only ONE model of the raspberry pi would have to beat C64 sales numbers, and then come with the operating system built in and ready to use with a functioning keyboard.

      The Pi just isn't in the same class. It's a great hobby computer board though, and more powerful obviously - but it's not a complete ready-to-use computer when you buy it.

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    3. Re:This is absurdly incorrect on its face by nctritech · · Score: 2

      We can split hairs all day long over this. The Raspberry Pi and its successors are not general-purpose computer systems for the era they are built within. They don't come with a display, keyboard, mouse, they don't have enough RAM to run a modern browser (at least the original Pi doesn't) and even when the RAM was upgraded they still have a pokey ARM chip at the core. The Pi boards are just little bare compute boards. They don't even come with a case or a power supply. They are designed to be embedded devices, not general-purpose computers (in the colloquial sense, not the "it can do more than a highly specialized set of operations" sense.) The Pi is literally nothing more than a cell phone board design modified to expose various ports and GPIO pins. To say that it's a computer is like saying the Apple Watch is a computer. In a strict technical sense it is, but it's not useful to the general public for their day-to-day computing tasks.

      If I reference the HP Pavilion p563w, I'm talking about a complete general-purpose computer with very particular specifications sold to the public under a specific model number. Same thing for the Commodore 64, or the Apple IIe, or the Atari ST 1040. When I say "Raspberry Pi B+" I'm talking about a specific model of embedded processing board. To say that "The Raspberry Pi has beaten the Commodore 64 in total sales" while combining the Pi A, Pi B, Pi A+, Pi B+, Pi Zero, Pi 2B, Pi 3B, and all the other Pi variations into the entire brand name "Raspberry Pi" is complete and utter bullshit. To claim that the Pi is a general-purpose computer just because it has USB, ethernet, HDMI, and Wi-Fi is disingenuous at best because it can barely even execute a modern internet browser on some models, if it can run one at all, and once it's running it's unusably slow. Being able to spin up a copy of Firefox or Chromium isn't optional for a computer meant to be useful to the unwashed masses. It's intended to be an embedded device, plain and simple. My Pi B is sitting on a shelf next to me, unused because the only thing it's good for is Xbian, and even that struggles to perform acceptably.

      Before anyone says something: no, Midori does not count.

  8. Re:Beating Commodore 64!!?! by dwywit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I get the joke, but mine is a very effective headless, X-less torrent client and media server. It streams internet radio into the home stereo, and without the buffering issues that Windows machines seem to have. I can add a Linux ISO to the torrent queue and forget about it until I actually want to try it out.

    Both of which could be handled by an old laptop running Windows or Debian, of course, but not for the price and energy consumption of the Pi.

    --
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  9. Re:Apples and Oranges. by 91degrees · · Score: 2

    You really just need a keyboard and mouse. At that point it's a functional PC with programming languages, and several utilities. Much more than the C64 had.

  10. Re: No comparison to the C64 by Aighearach · · Score: 2

    You can get an old 8052 processor if you want to build something similar, but if you want something in a small surface mount package the cheapest is actually going to be a 32 bit ARM, with a few 8 bit AVR and PIC micros close behind. But expect to pay over a dollar if you want 64K RAM, not a few cents.

  11. Re: No comparison to the C64 by amiga3D · · Score: 2

    I bought my first C64 in 1984 for $199 with the C1541 5.25" floppy disk drive for another $199 at the BX on Keesler AFB. I still have them and they still work. I just hooked it up to a TV the other day to look for some text files I had on a disk. My 1084 monitor died unfortunately and finding one in my area has been impossible. I've also got 16 Raspberry Pi boards. 2 original B, 2 of the B2 boards, 4 A+ boards, 4 Rpi B3 boards, 2 pi zero boards and now 2 pi zeroW boards. I've got about half of them in use at the moment with 6 running cameras on a surveillance system. 1 with libreelec media center on it and 1 with retropie for games. I also have one that I have set up as a desktop and I sometimes use it just to fool around. That's the thing about the Pi. It's got so much it can do but they're so cheap you tend to just collect them. They use next to no power so if you want to run a torrent 24/7 it's almost free as far as electrical power so why tie up your big quad core Intel beast for something trivial? If you fry one experimenting ( I use the old first generation ones for that) it's not a big deal. Once I build a box to connect my 1541 I'm going to pull all the data off my old 5.25 floppies before I can't. I'm kind of shocked that I haven't lost any as far as I can tell, it's over 30 years now.