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Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Launched (raspberrypi.org)
New submitter stikves writes: The Raspberry foundation has launched an incremental update to the Raspberry Pi 3 model B: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ . In addition to slight increase (200MHz) in CPU speed, and upgraded networking (802.11ac and Gigabit, albeit over USB2), one big advantage is the better thermal management which allows sustained performance over longer load periods. Further reading: TechRepublic, and Linux Journal.
Starting from Raspberry Pi 3 (can't find any information about Raspberry Pi 2 version 1.2 which use the same CPU as Pi3, not as earlier Pi2s), the U-boot bootloader is UEFI compliant and several Linux distributions's (such as, for example, openSUSE Tumbleweed) AArch64 image can be run in 64bits mode.
source: tumbleweed's wiki entry about Raspberry Pi 3.
So there should be a way to load Debian AArch64 on your Pi.
(But of course it will be less optimized/geared toward Pi than a real Raspbian 64)
From what I've read in forums and interviews, there isn't a plan to do Raspbian64 in the immediate future, due to lots of 32bits (ARM6 or 7) Pis still in the wild, and the Rasberry Pi Foundation wanting not to dilute their resources over too many goals.
(Then I'm sure that the gentoo people have their own flavour completely optimized to the bone for 64bit Pi)
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The SD card is insanely slow.
If that's your concern, then you can always network boot the Pi-3, which is a better option for reliability anyway.
At the end of the day, though, with the Raspberry Pi, you will always use a somewhat dated Broadcom SoC. (The Pi's designers are Broadcom employees).
Those SoC's aren't "general purpose" devices. The Pi is cheap because it repurposes a chip that is produced by the billion and designed for TV's, set top boxes, and disc players. The SoC's are designed to handle a few MiB/sec of HD Video, to be decoded & pushed via HDMI. They can do GPU tasks to give the set-top box a better UI. They are not designed for serious I/O.
The Pi is designed, first, foremost, and always, to be cheap. Every single one of the performance enhancements you mention don't matter to the million-unit lot SoC's used for set top boxes, and would require custom chips, driving the cost beyond the Pi foundation's goals.
If you want the latest and greatest technologies, then you better expect to pay dearly for them. The Pi uses old tech because it's cheap.
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