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

Moar RAM!

[Revek]

I would be more satisfied with doubling the ram than the AC wireless.

Re:Moar RAM!

[sl3xd]

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.

UEFI compliant

[DrYak]

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)

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:Don't get it...

[ledow]

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.

TFS and TFA are for newbs

[fyngyrz]

The real pros don't even read the post that they are replying to . . .

I just read the slashdot UID and let fly.

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.

Re:Buy a better board

[tlhIngan]

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.

The problem is, the Pi has something a lot of other boards don't - a community. Most alternative Pi boards are released with outdated software and that's it - the manufacturer stops supporting it and it rots. But eh Raspberry Pi is well supported and kept up to date by a while pile of people, who are able and willing to help people with their problems.

The Pi's greatest asset is not the hardware, but the fact there's a huge community willing to help you out.

Re: 64 bit OS ?

[TimMD909]

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...

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.