Slashdot Mirror
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.
Am I the only one that still uses the original Raspberry Pi? CPU speed has never been the selling point of em to me.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I would be more satisfied with doubling the ram than the AC wireless.
Hoping for true gigabit networking and USB 3.0.
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.
what is the point of gig-e when all io is on 1 usb bus?
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)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
>Any sign of a 64 bit Raspbian yet ?
You can try this: https://github.com/bamarni/pi6...
Realistically though, on 1GB of RAM you're likely to notice a slight performance degradation moving to 64 bit due to the larger pointer sizes taking up more of the limited RAM. There probably are use cases which could benefit from a 64 bit OS on a 1 GB RAM pi, but they are few.
I'm hoping that a future model 4 will have more than 4GB, where 64bit will be a net benefit.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
People wanting to do small tinkering projects, or file servers, or whatever
are probably all happy with the Raspberry 1 (I certainly am).
People wanting to do video processing (which was the initial target of this class of chips by Broadcom anyway) are probably happier with more Mhz giving more power to offload h264 (and partial h265) to the hardware.
People using it as a retro gaming machine are also happier with more Mhz giving faster / more precise emulation.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you are trying to ingest more than 2GB of data on a Pi hosted mongodb, then you have bigger problems than lack of 64 bit capability.
The Pi is not the only game in town, there are alternatives with beefier CPUs. To me frankly the biggest thing Pi did was prove there was a viable market and encouraged some more entrants to the 'embedded scale, but not custom' market.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
ODROID XU4 It's a little pricey compared to a $35 board, but it has what you wanted.
If you're planning on putting together a NAS you might consider the HC2-- I have one myself and it was a snap to set up.
Guess I should say Raspbian is not the only game in town, since the hardware and firmware platform can support aarch64 distros. Still I'd say other hardware platforms are a better for accomplishing whatever you are trying to do given your gripe.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's a great little device for lots of purposes. For other things it sucks. You pick the tool for the job. Try hanging an Amiga 500 from a tree limb with a camera and cell modem hooked to a solar charging unit. Try doing it for an almost throw away price. There are hundred of other uses I've seen for the Pi. It's helped thousands of creative people make their projects viable at a cheap price.
You mean a GBP30 device that let's you bit-bang GPIO pins at up to 300Khz, run off battery and provide HDMI out and a Linux desktop is pointless for people tinkering with hardware?
I'm no defender of the RPi foundation (there are STILL performance and reliability problems with the USB and Ethernet buses because they are shared and under heavy load you can drop USB packets, they surfaced in the very first models and haven't been fixed and they tried to blame the SD-card, so I ended up sending my own off to a technician at Broadcom) but the devices are getting better all the time. Hell, for GBP30 you can slap RetroPi on them and build an arcade cabinet from the GPIO/USB that can run all kinds of stuff.
P.S. Nobody cares about h/w level programming. The BBC Micro:Bit is a flop. The RPi skips it and goes straight to Scratch on a Linux desktop. Teachers don't have the skills to do the simplest of things like that themselves, let alone teach them.
I speak as someone who works in IT in schools, spent all my youth doing just that, teaching myself Z80 assembly, removing the copy-protection on DOS games via disassembly x86, building circuits, etc.
I was one of the first to get an RPi, and didn't like it because it was "too easy", too powerful and too boring - but it's WAY over the heads of the average school child even with years of lessons. They'll turn it on, boot up Linux, click around, get bored, done. There's no way that even 1% of the RPi's that have been sold have ever had any amateur electronic hardware ever connected to them in a school. Schools will buy pre-made modules, or nothing at all. And if it hasn't got a lesson plan to go with it, forget it.
The RPi was sold on but NEVER got any focus as "educational kit for schools to teach electronics", they never even tried and they didn't even go to BETT (the biggest UK IT in schools exhibition), they have no interest in getting them there. It was my complaint about them from day one, that they NEVER did what they would need to do to get into schools. They just relied on "someone clever will do that bit for us", and it's never materialised. A good teacher could do it, but they could do it with anything and probably wouldn't choose an RPi (too many distractions readily available). There is NOTHING for teachers, and most teachers don't even know what they are, and even IT teachers wouldn't be able to image an SD card and boot them by themselves without a tutorial.
But as a hobbyist device, these things are fabulous, now. They could be a lot better, too. That's the point of them... a 1.4GHz battery-powered ARM kit that can bit-bang. Brilliant for me. Useless for teaching anyone anything about electronics or hardware that you couldn't just teach on a PC itself.
Honestly, nobody is going to officially teach the bits that you and I would like kids to learn, ever again, in any kind of serious depth. They just won't, because the teachers are two generations down from people who didn't understand it. Geeks don't go into teaching because the stuff they end up having to teach is SO DULL it's unbelievable.
Unless you show a kid it yourself, it's not going to happen with any level of Micro:Bit, Arduino, .NET Gadgeteer, RPi or anything else ever released. Honestly, it's just not.
Previous model topped off at ~60Mbps, new model can do 330Mbps so even if you're pumping it back out to another I/O device you still could theoretically get ~160Mbps which is a significant improvement.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The Rock64 has all this and more. I have one - 1gb model was $25. Took almost a month for it to arrive in the States but was what I needed - specifically AES decryption in hardware. They have a cool $99 notebook based on a pi-like board too: https://www.pine64.org/
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
what is the point of gig-e when all io is on 1 usb bus?
From the article:
"While the USB 2.0 connection to the application processor limits the available bandwidth, we still see roughly a threefold increase in throughput compared to Raspberry Pi 3B."
You'd have to generate a lot of IO to drop below the original 3B throughput.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I just read the slashdot UID and let fly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Realistically though, on 1GB of RAM you're likely to notice a slight performance degradation moving to 64 bit due to the larger pointer sizes taking up more of the limited RAM.
If I recall correctly . . . when HP-UX moved to 64-bit, HP had to pull some published benchmarks, and adjust them down.
The IBM AIX folks saw this, and supported both 32-bit and 64-bit for while, instead of going full 64-bit right away.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Emulated hardware is better anyway. Here you go.
You're welcome.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nice timing, releasing this on Pi Day
In that case you're far better off buying an Odroid C2 or many of the other low-cost SOCs out there. Much better performance for roughly the same cost.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Same thing with SPARC. If you loaded the 64 bit build of Solaris then 32 bit binaries actually ran slower. Having a 64 bit CPU makes no difference until you need to address more RAM.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
A young man who is going out on a date may need to understand how hardware works.
Speaking seriously, the RPI 3 B+ is a good start to learn hardware and computing of the physical world.
Apparently no one knows the original reason for building the Pi. It was to have the absolute cheapest platform to hack on for students. You need a better CPU or a SATA port? Pony up that extra $20 and buy something better.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This is a question from the 1980's. Let's ask Mr. Owl. He knows everything. (but rephrased from the 1980's)
Mr. Owl: Why do I need 10 Mbps ethernet card for $1,000 when my computer can barely sustain 1 Mbps?
Mr. Owl says: it's not all about your node's sustained throughput. It's about the capacity of the network you are connected to. Higher bits per second means higher capacity and therefore ability to have more packets flowing, although not necessary to and from your node.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Skill level and employment status tend to be tentatively linked at the best of times.
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
The biggest improvement in the RPi I've been looking forward to is USB3/GBe. It's nice in the model 3 they added GBe, but it's pretty much pointless if you go and plug it into a USB2 port.
Real World Expected Speeds:
Thus, on the RPi3, GBe @ USB2 speeds means, MAYBE 14MB/s, BUT as others have noted, other IO devices on the RPIs share the same bus, so real-world speeds will be less. UGH.
Um, asynchronous switches with buffers have been a thing since forever, this isn't a tokenring network.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Check out adafruit for just a few examples of stuff you can build. Between beaglebone and pi (to name just two) anyone with decent tinkering skills can do their own home automation with no snoop from google, apple, ... I know I have built a pool controller, irrigation controller, garage door interface, AC monitor, furnace monitor, CO2 monitor and soon to add ????. The main limitation I have found is power. They are too hungry to run off batteries.
I donâ(TM)t think that in 25 years I worked with a person who considered themself to be âzthe greatestâoe in their profession without being considerd mediocre at best by the rest of the people surrounding them.
The Pi has a level of ubiquity its cousins can't even dream of. "Quantity has a quality all its own."
It's how better architectures and OSes lost out to the inferior but popular x86 and DOS.
Then, as now, being more popular means there is far better support to be found on the internet, better distro support, more experts, etc.
I design my own circuit boards, and program the microcontrollers from scratch; but I generally only do that when it's the only option. There have been a number of projects I chose the Pi over any other SoC board because I don't have to tinker around to make it work.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
All of these upgrades ... AC wireless and gigabit ethernet totally wasted by piping it over USB2
I have a NAS with an Intel Atom CPU from a decade ago that will still run circles around any PI setup.
Good for you, but that's not my use case. Don't need the giant bandwidth. Only need the extreme low power to serve files at video-playing bandwidth. A glorified networked USB stick, if you want.
Combined with printing service (can locally print a file that was updated to it, circumventing limitations of a locked-down windows laptop with no admin account to install printer drivers).
Could also install rtorrent on it, for occasionnal download.
Coupled with a couple of other similar extremely simple services.
Your Atom installation, while porbably awesome, is completely overkill to me.
If you're going to go with a PI setup for a NAS, you might as well just take the router you already have that likely already has a USB port and put something like DDWRT, Tomato, or LEDE on it and attach an external HD to the USB port, then enable Samba on the firmware distro.
That was *exactly* my target. Except that the router is locked, can't be installed with any opensource firmware. (It's the thing I got for free from the provider).
I could have thrown it away and spent decent money on a high quality router.
Or just re-use an old raspberry Pi that I have laying around, basically installing the same kind of software functionality that I would have installed on a router with OpenWRT.
(Also, the router happens to have decent Wifi, so it basically at least works as intended as a router. Though without IPv6).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It's 1.4GHz.
And what 386 ever ran at 200MHz? Were you even around then? They ran at about one-tenth of that. Or over 50 times slower than a Raspberry Pi.
You must have had a very different 386 than I did. I remember thinking the 40 mHz AMD ones were pretty cool, not like those paltry 33 mHz Intel ones.
The i386 never ran faster than 40 MHz and the ARM chips at the time were already faster per clock while drawing less power.
The SoC in the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ has four 64-bit ARM cores running at 1.4 GHz, albeit in-order. This is 200 MHz more than the previous Raspberry Pi 3 B (non-plus).
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
It depends on the use case; for hobbyist projects I agree that the Pi is better, but for the scenario he presented the Odroid would be much better. I've used both, depending on my need.
I would like to see a Pi with some GPU that could be used for some VR, high-fidelity 3D gaming, and perhaps some GPU-optimized deep learning.
I am pretty sure the limiting factor was that they only have an interconnect option to a cellular modem, or a bunch of gpio pins like they are currently configured.
That was the whole reason for using the USB 2 bus instead of something faster.
Really the chip line the Pi is based on should have been decommissioned long ago, but instead they found new life selling to 'makers' and opening up documentation as they became ever more obsolete.
I do agree that the open documentation is good, just that at the same time they have slacked on ensuring a design which was future compatible (still stuck with 1GB of RAM as an SoC limitation 3 generations later...)
My next build is likely going to be a Rock64. The 4GB of LPDDR3 plus gigabit ethernet plus optional USB 3 and wifi will make it much superior in almost every way I might want to use it, and it supports standardized EMMC adapters, even if they cost 1/4 to 1.5x the cost of the SBC itself. All of this makes it a far better platform than the Pi, except for GPIO or GPU related endeavors, both of which it is slightly lacking in (The latter due to its Mali-400/450 based graphics core, which while having more power than the VC4, isn't as reprogrammable. The VC4 for the record could emulate OpenCL support, as well as 'regular' OGL 2.1 support thanks to its opcode design, albeit at a loss in performance. Mali is built like an old GPU in comparison and cannot.)
Shame on them for wanting to only look after the one distribution that covers 10 boards. (4 Pi, 2 Pi 2, 2 Pi 3 and 2 Pi Compute)
How lazy are then not to want to add a 64-bit distribution for this board that is obstensibly a small single board computer with 1GB of RAM aimed mainly (Barring 2 of the boards) at school kids for learning and so that they can try things and don't have to worry about accidentally frying them.
I think more people should make veiled threats of violence and downright insults - because that's what they really need! Bajillions of people not exagerating in the slightest because, you know, them and the ones paid to work on it obviously don't have anything better to do!
Port Win95 to ARM and you can. (well, give or take some drivers)
Heck, there's enough spare proc you could probably emulate a 386 and boot your precious.
In other news, bad troll is bad. You get no cookie.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Network AND storage over a shared USB 2 bus?
Nah, no thanks.
Kriston
I was more hoping to see the Raspberry being able to be fed from a PoE switch.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
They still don't have gigabit networking on board? The orange pi does I believe at near half the cost.
Very happy with my pi's but using networking over USB is simply not going to happen
can i run windows 95 on it?
yes
That sucks that you can't be WebScale enough with the Pi and terabyte sized MongoDB assets. I'm in a similar situation. The Z80 in my TI-83 won't run Crysis 4, even though I requested it. We are truly pitiful victims here. Life is so hard...
1/50 as fast by clockrate, and probably 1/200 the performance because of the gains in efficiency made by modern processors. Clock rate isn't everything, else the 3 GHz Pentium 4s would still be among the fastest CPUs available in performance (and they aren't).
Right, the only reason x86-->amd64 was such a performance increase is that amd64 is a superset of x86 where registers are concerned. Way more GP registers available by comparison. If everything about a uarch is kept the same except ability to support 64-bit data types, naturally you see a performance hit because of how much larger those 64-bit entities are...
It will get a PoE hat, but that hasn't been released yet.
and 12mhz or so was the critical point.
Up to that (and I think including, but it's been a while), everyone and his brother could design a motherboard.
The RF at speeds above that made it tricky, and suddenly the little shops had to buy motherboards from someone else, and there were soon just a handful.
And to *really* date myself . . . the reason I never built a wire-wrapped Apple ][ was that others had already done it--and they interfered with themselves.
hawk
Bought an ODROID board before, disappointed by the software support by the community. I guess I can't blame the company for it, but let's be honest, the prime reason to buy such a board is playing with community software. Also, using the recommended ROM, I was getting less performance than my Galaxy S3 despite the ODROID having the same SoC but more thermal headroom.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Some people used to ask "Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?" Then it was "Where were you when the shuttle blew up?" Later, it was "Where were you when the 9-11 terrorism happened?" The most recent one will be "Where were you at on 3/14/15 at 9:26:53am?" Now it'll be remembered for Stephen Hawking's death. His death comes on Pi day (3.14), the date which Albert Einstein was born. Hawking was also born on the date Galileo Galilei died (January 8th 1642), the year Isaac Newton was born later on Christmas... the day observed for the birthday of Jesus.
Not this time. No USB 3.0 ports. It's got gigabit Ethernet but it's still interfaced by USB 2, so the effective speed limit is around 300 Mbps. It also has 802.11ac, but again the performance is held back by USB. And the USB bottleneck remains if you are also using USB for other things.
The bump in processor speed, and the improved thermal management so you actually get the speed, are useful improvements. People embedding the Pi in commercial products will appreciate the new board's RF certification, making it easier to get approval for the completed product.
A useful improvement, but not everything that people had been hoping for. If you want all the connectivity you'll still have to buy an ODROID or a TinkerBoard, and deal with the less extensive software support for those products.
Which ODROID board was it?
My HC2 sysbench's about half as fast as my Dell XPS 13 9360 (2017). That's more than enough performance for me because it's just a NAS after all not a big server running MRI analysis or anything.
An ODROID U3.
It's $35. What do you want for $35?
Also, if Mongo DB cannot deal with 2Gb files with a 32 bit architecture, that strikers me of shit design by whoever wrote MongoDB. Why not whine at them instead of the people who refuse to provide you with a super computer for $35?
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe