Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Promises Better Performance, Starts at $25 (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the miniature-computers dept.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is adding a new device to its suite of miniature computers for industrial and enterprise customers. From a report: The charity today unveiled the Pi Compute Module 3+ (CM3+), successor to the two-year-old Compute Module 3 (CM3). The Pi Compute Module 3+ comes in four variants, starting at $25. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is derived from the CM3 board but offers better thermal behavior under load. That's possible because of the Broadcom's 64-bit BCM2837B0 application processor, which was also used in last year's Raspberry Pi 3B+, and 1GB of LPDDR2 RAM. The difference between the four variants resides in their storage limits. The CM3+ Lite does not offer a built-in eMMC Flash, whereas other variants include 8GB ($30), 16GB ($35), and 32GB ($40) of eMMC Flash. These eMMC flash chips are more reliable and robust than normal SD cards, the foundation claims.

15 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Impressive by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Raspberry PI line is the most impressive thing coming out of computing in the last 10 years. Of course, people will say "you can get better specs...Orange Pi...blah blah blah", but Raspberry PI is organized and has the entire chain figured out.

    1. Re:Impressive by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The best thing about the Raspberry Pi is really the fact that has basic IO communications allowing people with basic Electronics Skills to be able to make rather complex devices. In a world where everything is soldered and shipped as a black box unit. Having a device which will allow us to make such a device ourselves is welcomed.

      Now the Rasberry Pi, is good for a prototype system, I would recommend Arduino microcontrollers for more of a complete job (depending on its complexity) but the microcontrollers are cheaper and often offer the power for a lot of jobs.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:Impressive by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The best thing about the Raspberry Pi is really the fact that has basic IO communications allowing people with basic Electronics Skills to be able to make rather complex devices. In a world where everything is soldered and shipped as a black box unit. Having a device which will allow us to make such a device ourselves is welcomed.

      Now the Rasberry Pi, is good for a prototype system, I would recommend Arduino microcontrollers for more of a complete job (depending on its complexity) but the microcontrollers are cheaper and often offer the power for a lot of jobs.

      No, you can get boards to do all that.

      The biggest reason the Pi is successful as it is is simply down to the community. The Foundation has cultivated a community and maintains that community, which is why they have such longevity.

      You can get better boards easy, but they lack the community around them - software support and others are lacking, so many of these boards simply die on the vine. But a community offers support and a forum for doing "cool stuff" so support remains.

      It's like Arduino - it's popular because it has a huge library and a huge amount of support and coimmunity as well compared to just regular microcontrollers.

      It's these communities that let people take a Pi or an Arduino and get started doing stuff, get help and plenty more.

  2. entertainment center by fluffernutter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Has Rasberry Pi upped their game in terms of sound quality yet? Also can you play HECV on a raspberry pi? These are the things that are keeping me from making one into an entertainment center.

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    1. Re:entertainment center by Bobrick · · Score: 4, Informative

      Google will tell you in a split-second that the Raspberry pi doesn't have HEVC hardware decoding but the Orange Pi does. Apparently there are good results on the software side with Raspberry up to 720p, not so much with 1080p.

  3. Link to Raspberry Pi website by houghi · · Score: 3, Informative

    https://www.raspberrypi.org/bl...

    Because linking directly to the original source is hard.

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    1. Re:Link to Raspberry Pi website by Sarten-X · · Score: 5, Informative

      Apparently it is. That's the announcement of the original Compute Module in 2014.

      The new post is more recent.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  4. flash cards by Kludge · · Score: 2

    These eMMC flash chips are more reliable and robust than normal SD cards, the foundation claims.

    I have found that SD cards, when used for an OS filesystem, tend to have pretty short life spans. This has led me to
    1. Make very regular backups. If I do any significant modifications to a filesystem on an SD card, I dd the whole SD device to a backup file.
    2. Recently I have been using Samsung's high endurance SD cards. More expensive, hopefully they survive longer.

    1. Re:flash cards by wierd_w · · Score: 4, Informative

      You just need to format them correctly. Throwing "defaults" EXT4 on is bad juju for an SD card. (It does wasteful read-erase-write operations, which kills the card prematurely.)

      What you need to do, is discover what the erase block size is of that SD card, and then abuse the raid features of EXT4 to create aligned disk structures with that erase block size.

      See also this page. It's very informative.

      https://thelastmaimou.wordpres...

      These baked on eMMC cards have smaller erase unit sizes, and so they translate better to "defaults" EXT4 disk structures, and so last longer and give better performance. Removable SDCards have larger erase unit sizes, because they are intended to live inside a camera that throws lots of sequential data down in a huge burst, not tipple at the cup like a traditional disk drive does.

      When you create a filesystem with these extended attributes, the linux caching system changes its behavior so that disk writes are atomic with the stripe and stride. (It *IS* intended for efficiency with a RAID controller, which has to do wasteful stripe reads and writes to accomplish the task. Functionally, a large SDCard is a hardware RAID0 device, where the large erase unit size is derived from the stripe size.) This GREATLY improves throughput on reads and writes, *AND* **VERY GREATLY** improves write life.

      As always, don't be a chump; disable disk swap space, and use zram instead. Your SDCard will thank you.

  5. Re: industrial temperature range by Type44Q · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How about radiation-hardened models for cubesats?

  6. Re:Wonder what engineering mess it is this time by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Without the Raspberry Pi those "competitors" wouldn't even exist. That is why they all have "Pi" in their name. People that try to denigrate the efforts of people who worked really hard to bring these types of open learning systems into the world are the worst type.

  7. Re:The Charity?? by nickovs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Perhaps you might want to actually look into the facts before spouting utterly incorrect suppositions. A quick search of Companies House and two minutes reading of the financials show that less than 25% of the staff earn more than £60,000 a year and the highest paid person at the Raspberry Pi Foundation in the 2017 (last year will full published accounts) earned less that £150,000 in the year, on a little over £28,000,000 in turnover. Over at Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd. Eben Upton takes no salary and his wife Liz (who runs communications) earned £38,984 in the year and they paid out just over £11.5K in expenses to Dr. Upton. Assuming that "the executives who run it" are the highest paid people there, they hardly seem to be making themselves "rich". In Silicon Valley that would be considered a substance wage.

    --
    If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
  8. Re:Wonder what engineering mess it is this time by gweihir · · Score: 2

    Nonsense. There were designs like that _before_ the RaspberryPi. Their accomplishments on the marketing side have some merit, on the tech-side they damaged the field.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  9. Re:The Charity?? by ebenupton · · Score: 2

    /me checks driveway hopefully for Ferrari

  10. Re: industrial temperature range by ebenupton · · Score: 2

    I believe there were five on the station (two of ours, three we only recently found out about) until a couple of weeks ago. Now I think we're down to three (our two plus one other). Ours are used to run the Astro Pi program in partnership with ESA:

    https://astro-pi.org/