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.

Comments

Also PoE

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe this was left out of the summary: This board breaks out PoE and they are working on a HAT that will convert 48V PoE to the 5V required for the Pi. Or you can use it for other purposes.

Re:what is the point of gig-e when all io is on 1

[Junta]

For one, gigabit means that you could in theory get nearly half a gigabit, which is still higher than 100 mbit.

For another, and this is rare, there do exist network switches in the world that do not negotiate lower than 1 gigabit. I've only seen one model from one vendor so far that did this, and I think that product flopped in part due to inability to handle 100 mbit, but if I've seen one, there's probably more.

Finally, it may not be possible to get a 100 mbit NIC anymore, or at least do so and get any savings out of it. It's like in embedded you have flash parts that are 80% empty, because the cheapest flash parts are now still 4x the size some of these applications need.

Re:Neat, but not really needed...

[Kenja]

I would, for lower power consumption and heat.

Re:64 bit OS ?

[TheRaven64]

FreeBSD has 64-bit images for the RPI3, unfortunately I believe that it's still lacking a 64-bit-clean driver for the sound device (the device lets you provide a 32-bit cookie value that's returned back to the kernel when an event completes, but the current driver uses a pointer and this needs to be changed to use an indirection table). The WiFi wasn't working because of a lack of SDIO support: SDIO is now supported, but I don't think the WiFi chip is yet.

Criteria of "better"

[DrYak]

Depends on your criteria defining better.

One could also consider the opensource friendliness of the chipset :
  - Broadcom's VideoCore is one of the few ARM chips where everything running on the ARM core can be opensource upstream code (Raspbian updates its kernel regularily). All the proprietary blobs are restricted to the DSPs handling video. You can even run without them (specially if you aren't interested in processing video, but use the pi as a micro server).

(The Freescale family of chips selected by Purism for their Librem 5 smartphone is another example that can be run 100% of opensource).
(I suspect that the RISC-V will also bring interesting free-software friendliness)

  - Lots of other chips limits you to kernel version "whatever happened to be popular on Android back then, now you're stuck with it". You're stuck with antique kernels full of blobs.

One could consider the community :
Raspberry Pis are among the most popular SBC, have gathered a ginormous community of users.
That means you can easily find tons of answers for common questions easily on forums and other web ressources,
lots of add-on products will be specially be designed with raspberries in mind
etc.

In the few case I've researched the subject: the cases of cheaper board with higher-clocked CPUs and more features touted on the bullet list provided by the marketeers, tend to also use much cheaper chips with crappier Linux support and although they tout lots of GPIO pins, those aren't 1:1 compatible with Pi (nor even follow any attempts of standard like HAT).
They're great if you only plan to interface them with extremely generic hardware (basically if you mostly attach your stuff on the USB ports) or if you're making your own hardware (where the only requirement you have regarding the GPIO pins is that they exist).

Raspberry Pi basically has managed to become the IBM PC of the home computer : sure, better things exist elsewhere. But that's what everything is palying with.
And if like me you're not the world's best expert in SBCs, better to stick with the most popular and most widely supported stuff.