New Multi-Core Raspberry Pi 2 Launches 355
First time accepted submitter MicroHex writes Coming in at the same $35 price-point that has come to be expected from the Raspberry Pi, it looks like the new Model 2 will be packing a quad-core ARM processor with a GB of RAM. From the article: "The Raspberry Pi Foundation is likely to provoke a global geekgasm today with the surprise release of the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: a turbocharged version of the B+ boasting a new Broadcom BCM2836 900MHz quad-core system-on-chip with 1GB of RAM – all of which will drive performance "at least 6x" that of the B+."
Editing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Editing (Score:5, Funny)
The editors run all submissions through three rounds of Google translate (Ukrainian to Korean to Swahili) then translate the output back to English. Dice Holdings considers this editorial technique their second greatest achievement. Blashdot Seta is their crowning achievement.
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And by "editors" you of course mean "perl scripts".
Re: Editing (Score:2)
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After nothing coming of my own submissions over the years, I've been curious about what exactly is done here. Finally some clue from another....
Disk Speed (Score:2)
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I bought a Banana Pi as a download/torrent box. Only slightly more expensive (especially if you include shipping) but with a SATA port that gives me about 60MB/s. And it runs Raspbian.
naming scheme is going to drive people to drink (Score:5, Insightful)
Good grief is the naming scheme tiresome.
Did anyone think about problems this goofy naming scheme causes? The ease of searching supplier's catalogs, googling, etc? Hell, just talking to another person? "Oh yeah, I've got the Pi 2 Model B plus", versus "I've got a Model D." Did anyone concern themselves with the fact that a lot of resellers may not ID the revision at all? How are you supposed to google for an issue you're having with the latest model?
It's the ecosystem-- (Score:5, Insightful)
But the Raspberry Pi has a large and growing ecosystem behind it -- developers (hardware and software), users, and more.
The Arduino is a similar beast -- underpowered, overpriced, and with a tremendous ecosystem, approachable and available to new classes of users.
As an example, look at what Adafruit is doing with Arduinos and the Raspberry Pi -- making them available, accessible, and useable by a wide audience, not just those tho are comfortable rebuilding kernels.
Look at other historical examples -- the underpowered 6502 (Apple ][) or that atrocity with 640k is good enough for anybody, right?
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*Bingo*. Also, I have a group of friends that complain that it's *over* powered, too large and takes too much power. Every bugger wants everything to be exactly tailored to their own imagined specs.
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HEVC? (Score:2)
lol. Most Pi projects fit a 20Mhz, 1024 byte MCU (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm laughing at those Windows 8 users posting here complaining that a friggin GIG of RAM isn't enough. Most rPI projects are also done on Arduinos and similar, with a 20Mhz clock and RAM measured in bytes. Typical Pi programs are hundreds of bytes. 1024 bytes is 1024 small variables; how many do you need to turn lamps on and off, or position a servo?
Running your 200 byte program on top of a Linux kernel is just a convenience. It's not made to run Microsoft Office on it all day, it's designed for reading a few switches, turning on a motor, and lighting an led - which requires about 24 bytes of RAM.
Of course some people use them as entertainment media centers. That's kind of the one oddball use that needs a thousand times the resources of most things people use their Pi for.
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Windows 8 grabs only 600 MB RAM on startup. Launch a couple of Office programs and you would still be easily under 1024 MB.
Of course this a bit past your point. You're correct that writing embedded software is quite a different task than doing GUI stuff with all the bells and whistles. :)
Power usage? (Score:4, Informative)
Quad cores are mighty hungry and I doubt it will come with those fancy lithium ION expensive batteries on our smart phones.
This is important as these are for embedded devices
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They still manufacture the A+, which I was playing around with this very afternoon, it is still single core, and even with a Edimax usb wifi nub (I hesitate to call it a dongle, it's too short) plugged in, it only pulls about 130mA, but "spikes" to 160mA when you start pinging Google or 250mA if you start X. By comparison the B+ single core starts at around 250mA draw due to the extra USB host controller and can well exceed 600mA running Minecraft with a mouse and keyboard plugged in and the GPU at full til
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Should be 64-bit (Score:2)
R-Pi 2.x should be 64-bit. This is a learning platform, and the future is 64-bit arm .... NOW.
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Right because the demand for more than 4 gigs of ram and tons of virtual address support for those Oracle databases these suckers are going to be processing.
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Man, you need to refill that xanex prescription soon.
It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)
The Raspberry Pi series is an awesome hobbyist device at an impossibly low price point.
I'm glad they are finally offering more memory and multi-core processors. That way I don't need to get a BananaPi or other copycat. This way, I can continue to support the vitally important Raspberry Pi foundation and their goals.
Thanks for finally offering more memory and multi-core. Next time let's also choose a truly open framebuffer, or let's pressure Broadcom to open their VideoCore architecture once and for all.
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From my perspective, this announcement puts the Raspberry Pi squarely in the Big Leagues. I've played around with Asterisk and also NeoRouter VPN Server using my original Pi, and this is perfect hardware for these critical tasks. Another one is as an Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The Asterisk/FreePBX can appreciate the extra horsepower this new development affords and should run fine. Not much more than a month ago, this CuBox-i4PRO won a nice end-of-
I hate sequels (Score:2)
They really should have called it the Rho.
How many saying it's crap actually used one? (Score:2)
I used a few building some hobbyist level stuff and I found it easy to use, tons of software and documentation available in proper english and if you want to build network/internet enabled stuff it's way cheaper than using arduino, pic based stuff or any other thing I found available.
Latest example: I built a nixie clock with ntp sync. Is the pi wildly overpowered? Of course, but the A+ + 8gb microsd card ran me ~22eur plus the cost of a 8gb microsd and a wi-fi adapter (I had those and don't remember the or
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It's a typical /. response of critisise first, never do. And yes, the main selling point of the Pi is the community and support around it, not the actual board itself.
Already imagining... (Score:2)
I'm already imaginig a Beowulf cluster of these.
Already imagining... (Score:2)
Not even kidding. I really am.
Well, where is it? (Score:2)
I'm I the only one that has noticed that:
1. The official site has nothing about it
2. Broadcom has nothing on their site about a BCM2836
3. On the register photo, there is no RAM on the PI (it should be on top of the processor)
and many many more little things
Windows10 support (Score:4, Interesting)
Did anyone notice this: http://dev.windows.com/en-us/featured/raspberrypi2support
Apperantly at zero cost... Might get interesting...
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you should take two minutes and read the FAQ. The Raspberry Pi's primary design goal was to be low cost. There are a hundred other companies now selling more powerful (and expensive) boards. This was designed to be a learning tool for students and hobbyists, not a set top multimedia box.
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You can find chinese SoC boards with much more performance and RAM for as little as $5-10 more. Yeah yeah, everyone gets it, the Pi is not meant to be a work horse and no one ever claimed otherwise, but what good is it if it's a total pain in the arse to use because of way too little power and memory to offer up a decent user experience? There's just no rationalizing away the fact that they have been grossly underpowered regardless of context. This new model steps up a little bit but it's still a few paces
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Informative)
There's just no rationalizing away the fact that they have been grossly underpowered regardless of context.
I have to disagree there. They are plenty powerful for learning basic coding on. They're plenty powerful for a basic web server for a local network. They're plenty powerful for controlling various bits of hardware via the GPIO port. They're plenty powerful for plenty of things.
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:4, Interesting)
not only that, but unlike alternatives, this is the only one I found that my TV's USB port can power. so my B+ is powered by TV and feeds the TV via HDMI. I'm not sure even this newer version will be able to live without an external power adaptor. I know nobody cares but I for one won't be upgrading anytime soon.
I did have to make some changes to raspbian's filesystems so that switching off TV didn't leave dirty bits on filesystems, but it was fun tinkering with it.
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I did have to make some changes to raspbian's filesystems so that switching off TV didn't leave dirty bits on filesystems, but it was fun tinkering with it.
I'm very interested in the changes you've made. Please could you contact me about this ?
Thanks in advance
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Different poster, but I did the same. Start by looking for 'read-only filesystem raspbian'. You'll find a bunch of tutorials which tell you how to stop logs etc. and mount the system in read-only mode, together with some nice scripts for dropping in and out of read/write mode for updates.
First link I found which looks relatively sane is http://blog.pi3g.com/2014/04/make-raspbian-system-read-only/
For me, I wanted to have the Pi in the car and the accessory power has a habit of going off without warning when
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You can find chinese SoC boards with much more performance and RAM for as little as $5-10 more.
R-Pi has more extensive documentation and a huge support community.
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of a Raspberry Pi isn't to replace an Intel i7 clocked at 3GHz, it's to replace a 6502 clocked at 2MHz: to provide kids with a system to hack on. You don't need shedloads of performance to develop great software, and, indeed, the less resource you have, the more inclined you are to code tightly and efficiently. As a learning tool, less really can be more.
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:4, Insightful)
So no one said you had to buy a rPi. Go buy the Chinese board instead.
What you'll find is probably no shocker. First, you can order the board today, but tomorrow no, the board is completely different and won't work with your software today.
Second, your board is obsolete and no matter how you beg, they will not make more, so you have to move your project to a new board and start over.
Third, documentation? If you're lucky, it's in Chinese. Forget about a community - these guys just produce hardware, get something running and ship it. If it happens to work, good on you.
One of the biggest advantages the Pi has over everyone else is the community. It's big, it's documented and everyone got their stuff working so you can Google or ask for help.
Just think that in the time the Pi has been around and outclassed, there are probably dozens of "rPi killers" boards that were produced with faster processors, better hardware,, and not a lot more dollars ($5-15). Problem is, they fizzled not because they weren't good, but they were one-shot products. The Pi sold millions, these manufacturers maybe do a run of 10,000 then move on to something new, never again to bother with the design because they needed to use up some spare parts.
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The problem with the Pi isn't whether you want to run X on it or not.
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I don't run Ruby on my embedded stuff. But you made me curious, so I just looked at rss of a 3 liner Ruby program that loops with a sleep, 4864 pages or 19.5MB. I also happen to know from experience that a Ruby forking daemon that does web-like or smtp-like stuff will use up 100MB.
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Yeah and these things are SoC/hobbist devices. Chances are you aren't multitasking with them they are being used to do one thing at a time. You can get a lot done in pretty much any language with 1GB of Ram. You won't spin up a big database system but who the heck would be hosting a database on a cellphone processor anyways (not sqllite but I mean production scale)? Sure you want your code to run well on the hardware but does a 2X bloat really matter even at 900Mhz? I don't know maybe, but maybe the bloat i
When OLPC said Windows IMO they "jumped the shark" (Score:4, Informative)
Good catch! OLPC lost a lot of developer mindshare IMHO when they started cosying up to Microsoft and changing their hardware to run Windows. Example:
http://www.olpcnews.com/softwa... [olpcnews.com]
"For me, that paragraph represents the end of a dream. I say that XP on the XO is the end of One Laptop Per Child as an educational project. With a Microsoft operating system, an XO becomes a "$200 laptop", a cheap Toshiba replacement, not an educational learning tool for children. With the Sugar User Interface, OLPC can claim to have a Constructionist learning methodology, it can claim to be promoting exploration and learning, it can even hope to activate the view source key. But once you put on XP, no matter how much it may be customized to leverage the XO hardware, children will not be taught to "learn learning" as Negroponte promised. They will be taught "ICT skills", a phrase Negroponte himself railed against. Ministries of Education will be tempted to lock down XO's in computer labs and revert the whole one laptop per child idea back to one to many, effectively negating the goal of this grand dream. Yes, for me XP on the XO is the end of OLPC, no matter who is the CEO."
Hope Raspberry Pi does not suffer the same fate -- especially as I recently bought two B+ versions, :-) not knowing about either of these forthcoming changes (better hardware or Windows).
The last week or so, I've been watching for the new Beagleboard-X15, which is both open source hardware (Raspberry Pi design is not quite open hardware it seems) and will answer a lot of performance and memory issues at least compared to the Raspberry Pi B+ or the Beaglebone Black. ... Guidance is that it is certainly over $100 ..."
http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:... [elinux.org]
http://beagleboard.org/project... [beagleboard.org]
"The BeagleBoard-X15 is the newest member of the BeagleBoard family. Measuring 4" x 4.2", it is based on a Dual Core A15 processor running at 1.5GHZ and features 2GB of DDR3L Memory. It is in the beta phase.
So, that board is a lot pricier than this newer (or older) Raspberry Pi though. Not too much for a typical home office server use as an example (like to run NodeJS locally for testing on a separate non-VM box), but still 3X to 4X more for the board. However, when you add a case, extra media like a hard disk or big USB flash drive, and a power supply, and a wireless dongle, and so on, I doubt the overall cost is probably that much more than 2X for an entire system with the Beagleboard-X15.
B+ fixed the USB problems (Score:4, Interesting)
What's with all the ACs in this thread, anyway? Yes, the original A/B models had crappy USB, but the A+/B+ have much-improved circuitry, to the point that for most things you'll never need to bother with adding a hub.
I set up a B+ as a Bluetooth audio streaming box, and, while running off a 1000 mA power supply, the USB is stout enough to power a keyboard, mouse, Bluetooth dongle, and a Focusrite USB audio interface, all plugged into the onboard USB ports. That would have never worked on the older model.
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You can buy a dual core Cortex-A9 Android phone in China for about $40, give or take. And that comes with a screen. Sorry, SoCs are dirt cheap these days and the price point isn't an excuse to ship a 12-year-old core (seriously, ARM11 came out in late 2002).
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but can you get proper English language documentation for them? An AllWinner CPU is a good performer but the datasheet is only available in Chinese. The reason it's so cheap is that they didn't spend any money getting it translated or providing support overseas.
Also, Broadcom parts have a longer production life than the really low cost ones. They will be able to buy the same or fully compatible parts in five years time and keep making the same Raspberry Pi boards, providing a fixed hardware platform for people to work with. The low cost parts tend to get replaced fairly quickly. The people making those cheap phones will first look for some cheap SoCs and LCDs, then build the phone around them and make 100,000, and that's it. Parts are now obsolete and no longer manufactured, and the whole process repeats.
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*This. You can't ever compare the cost of a Chinese only product with the production cost of any commercial item in the west.
The Chinese operate on a pump and dump system. There was a good article on the economics of it on hackaday last year sometime. Effectively you end up with single run items pinout compatible with a variety of devices, a common board design to make whatever shit you got that day work, you run off a few 10s of thousands and then retool the layout and repeat with whatever you can get the
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How many IO ports does the phone have?
Can it connect to a real keyboard and a real screen (TV or monitor)?
How much RAM does it have/support?
Re: Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Insightful)
Phones come with a touchscreen, speakers, microphones, WiFi, Bluetooth, GSM, and an accelerometer, which also cost money. Probably more money than a few connectors on a board.
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I think the Raspberry Pi's main strength is the community around it. That's what other boards including the Banana Pi would fail to supply. From a hardware perspective it is underpowered though.
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:4, Informative)
Ironically, the chip WAS designed as a set top multimedia box (as was the original BCM2635 - which was used in the Roku 2).
The thing is, you offload the video decoding to the GPU (which is why it has a VideoCore IV, which is ridiculously overpowered compared to the CPU). The ARM processor's job is to feed the beast with data - handle networking, basic GUI, etc.
Now, what you're not doing with it is CPU intensive apps.
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Re:meh (Score:5, Informative)
The Raspberry Pi has the hardware to be very cheap while still being able to connect to a general lab setup and powerful enough for a lot of nice little projects.
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Most likely to maintain binary compatibility with instruction sets / extensions. But I could be wrong. It may also be a cost factor.
These boards are meant for hacking together projects and education. At a $35 price point, it's "good enough."
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, the Chinese have managed to design a phone [aliexpress.com] with a screen, dual radios, WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio, and a dual core Cortex-A9 CPU that can be effectively sold for $40 or so (if you buy it in China, not online). If the Chinese can build in a CPU core that's two generations newer into a product with support for 3 radio standards and a screen that sells for $5 or so more than the Pi, why is Broadcom struggling with an outdated 12-year-old core on a product with no wireless?
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they're trying to maintain compatibility with the existing ecosystem. The GPU did not change, they just added 3 more cores and another half gig of RAM. This is a drop-in replacement to keep their product competitive without breaking anything too drastic with their existing product line. Sort of along the lines of why the iPhone 5 had a taller screen and iPhone 6 actually had a usable sized screen. Baby steps. Those Chinese phone sellers don't have to support that product after they wrap it in bubble wrap and drop it in the mail; the RPi organization has industrial customers who have standardized on their hardware as a Long Term Solution and make up a sizable portion of their business (they're forcasting approx 20% of their business in 2015 will be industrial customers). So there's that.
The Raspberry Pi 3 in 2017 or so should be pretty amazing, between that phone you linked to, and the new ESP8266 it's clear we've only waded hip-deep in to the era of ultra low energy, high powered wireless devices. In the mean time this is a very acceptable bump in performance to what originally was an educational toy.
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Dual core A9? You sure about that? [cnx-software.com]
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:4, Informative)
Whoops, you're right. Other pages claimed it was an MT6517, but I just checked /proc/cpuinfo. Still, A7 is still a modern core, 9 years newer than ARM11.
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 3 (v7l)
processor : 0
BogoMIPS : 2589.52
processor : 1
BogoMIPS : 2589.52
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0xc07
CPU revision : 3
Hardware : MT6572
(0xc07 means Cortex-A7)
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The title on your original link does say MTK6572, and from the pastebin linked elsewhere it seems the RPi2 is also a Cortex-A7. I agree it's still a pretty old architecture though.
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Yup, all the other aliexpress pages I was looking at for the same phone said MTK6517, and I didn't notice that the one that I chose was different (I was just going for the lowest price, though the difference was a few bucks). Turned out to be the more accurate one it seems, since it matches the actual device that I have.
A7 is actually decent. It's low-end (as far as ARMv7 application processors go) but reasonably modern (late 2011, which isn't too bad). Nobody's asking for a bleeding-edge CPU in something l
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Oh wait! I know this one! Because we're not in China! (You can offer things at an amazing price point when you pay just slightly more than slave labor wages to your employees.)
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Informative)
It's everything the Pi and Pi 2 is, and everything the Pi and Pi 2 never will be, for the same $35.
Odroid C1 $35 (Score:2)
Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Insightful)
It's everything the Pi and Pi 2 is, and everything the Pi and Pi 2 never will be, for the same $35.
Except for the documentation and support. The Pi is an educational computer, there are loads of tutorials, books, accessories and datasheets available for it. Your kids won't find their school offering classes for it. Good luck getting support on driver bugs, or even diagnosing why your stuff doesn't work. The Odroid might be more powerful but it isn't really suitable for n00bs.
It's the same with the Arduino. People laugh because performance is crap and it's over-priced, but it's also much easier than anything else out there and hence very popular.
Re:Then buy a used PC (Score:2)
This is for embedded controllers and hobbyists. Think Lego Mindstorm projects?
FYI I ran FreeBSD/slackware on Pentium IIs 266 MHz single core just fine back in the day. This is fine for netbsd to run little databases, home media sharing, robots, and just about anything.
Not to run Chrome with +30 tabs, compile gnome, or run SystemD on. Get a real PC for that. For $35 you can make a fun tiny rack, stick them in a truck for a home made cd player, or gosh probably a million different things.
Re:Then buy a used PC (Score:4, Insightful)
You're confusing low-end with outdated. An ARM Cortex-M3 or M4 board would be a low-end board suitable for tasks such as motor control, while being reasonably modern, and cheaper than the Raspberry Pi. An ARM Cortex-A5 or higher would be modern and suitable for running Linux. ARM11 isn't low-end, it's high-end and outdated.
Raspberry Pi suffers from exactly the same problem as the Arduino: both are based on an ancient, woefully outdated platform. Just because performance is "good enough" for whatever your idea of "good enough" is, doesn't mean it makes any sense whatsoever to stick to cores that are 10 years old or older. Moving up to moder modern designs give you more bang for the same buck, or less buck for the same bang. In the silicon industry it just makes no sense whatsoever to lag behind 3 generations for something like this. Newer designs are built in newer process nodes, scale to higher frequencies, and cost less to manufacture for the same performance. Being at the bleeding edge of silicon is expensive, but drop down a generation or so (relative to whatever field you're interested in) and that's the price/performance sweet spot. Using older stuff just doesn't make sense.
This keeps happening over and over and over again. When I started embedded programming, back when the PIC16C84 was released (the first microcontroller to feature EEPROM program memory, soon followed by the PIC16F84 Flash version), it stirred up a hobbyist revolution. No longer did you need expensive EPROM burners, UV erasers, and expensive UV-windowed chips with an erase cycle measured in minutes! And yet 5 years later people were still using the same damn PIC16F84, with its sole timer and just about no other features, when you could buy a PIC16F88 for 2/3 the price and get three timers, built-in analog-to-digital conversion, serial port/UART, SPI/SSP, PWM, analog comparator, built-in 8MHz oscillator, more RAM and Flash, ... Why? Because PIC16F84 was popular and people were scared to use anything else, even if it is almost a drop-in replacement.
Then the Arduino happened, and even more people people joined what became called the maker movement. And us longtime PIC users rolled our eyes because we'd been doing it for years and we didn't need no steenking breakout boards for a trivial 8-bit chip, but hey, C compilers for PICs sucked, and AVR was a better architecture anyway, and so Arduino deservedly became popular. But then the silliness started to set in again: ARM came up with Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M0, and you could buy a 32-bit chip running at 4x the clock rate for the same price as the AVR in the Arduino, and yet even today people keep using AVR-based Arduinos when the microcontroller world has moved on. People are even sticking FPGA shields on an Arduino, which is like sticking a GTX970 on a Pentium MMX. You could implement the entire AVR inside that FPGA and run it faster than the real one sitting underneath. Why this madness? Because Arduino is popular and people are scared to move on.
And now with Raspberry Pi it's the same thing all over again. When the Pi came out it almost had a good excuse, because, even though its CPU was obsolete, and Broadcom's idea of making a powerful GPU chip and sticking an old CPU "on the side" was dumb, let's face it, nobody was building Linux-capable SBCs at that price point. But that's no longer the case, you can buy much more capable boards for the same $35 today. Why on earth would they release an updated model with an updated chip in 2015 that still uses the same damn architecture that is 12 years out of date? It just makes no sense, the only reason I can come up with is internal politics at Broadcom (trying to sell off outdated chips/designs for cheap, resistance from their GPU division to having a more powerful CPU in there, or something like that).
Re:Then buy a used PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring the actual Pi debate -
Darn those people who still use 68HC11 and 6502 controllers. You seem experienced enough to likely know yourself that if you've got a chip that's cheap enough not to ruin your BOM, that is available/in-production, does the job, has a solid toolchain, and coupled with years of development experience globally and in-house, then you don't just throw that all in the trash because something newer/faster/smaller/cheaper comes out.
Half the time I think a lot of people jump to the newest stuff because they don't like having their exclusivity eroded. Using older stuff makes sense when your product doesn't need cutting edge and you want to have a wealth of experience / dependability to draw from.
As for me, I'm still enjoying the AVR Tiny4/5/9/10 series, it's like the modern 555 ;)
Re: Then buy a used PC (Score:3, Interesting)
I was about to write something similar. I've developed on a Pi since the beginning and got accelerated, seamless video and picture loops to work for an ad platform currently in production. Changing to another board would cost another 300-500 hours in development costs. And that is if the other boards even have the features, most of the "other" boards don't have stable, open API to the GPU.
Mali GPUs which most of the "other boards" run just got decent acceleration in Linux in 2014, years after introduction o
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There's a difference between established industrial designs where there is an argument for maintaining compatibility and an existing codebase, and hobbyists which can quite happily move up the chain and are always looking for cool new stuff in other respects. Even in product development, some companies go out of their way to use ridiculously outdated, expensive chips. That usually only flies when it's for non-consumer applications where they can afford to throw more money at a chip vendor to keep making out
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yet even today people keep using AVR-based Arduinos when the microcontroller world has moved on.
8 bit CPU cores are still the most popular in the world sales wise, and for a good reason. They are cheap, extremely robust and well understood, easy to use and cheap to develop for. Those ARM cores you mentioned are a lot more work to do simple stuff. They are an order of magnitude more complex to code for.
I am an embedded software/hardware engineer. I do this for a living. 8 bit is still king, with some 16 bit stuff that isn't really that different (PIC24, MSP430) gaining ground now. Most of the time busi
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I do this for a living too, and I've said farewell to all the 8 bit designs I did before. I have not regretted this move at all. More memory, unified address map, more performance, better peripherals (32 bit timers, ethernet, DMA, etc), smaller packaging, cheaper, more vendor choices, same old GCC toolchain. And all it takes is a week or so of reading the user manual, and playing around with an eval board.
Re:Then buy a used PC (Score:4, Insightful)
When using an Arduino, I can realize a whole project in just hours, including setting up the (very simple) IDE, starting a template project, searching and installing some helper libraries (Timer, I2C, Serial, LCD) and filling in the glue code on the position marked in the template. When using a different target, even setting up the tool chain can take days. I would have to buy hundreds or even thousands of chips until the investment in a different tool chain and the development (and debugging) of the missing libraries would pay of.
When I get stuck with an Arduino, I can find lots of documentation, lots of working (!) example code and even working (!) step-by-step tutorials (even video-tutorials). This seriously limits the risks when developing with Arduino. In the embedded world, it is very easy to find surprising show stoppers for a certain approach on a given platform.
So there are several good reasons to use Arduino (or Raspberry Pi) for home grown or semi-professional projects, even when there are other options with lower cost per chip.
a billion operat per second enough for cat waterer (Score:2)
Raspberry Pis are used primarily for very small tasks, controlling a few motors and lights in a haunted house gimmick, running cool Christmas lights, or an alarm system reading sensors once per second. A CPU capable of a BILLION operations per second is about ten thousand times more than what's needed.
Similarly, over a billion bytes of RAM. Controlling twelve zones of Christmas lights uses an array of twelve variables - 12 bytes. The program code might be another 200 bytes. So you have 1,073,741,600 by
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If you want to control a few motors and lights with network connectivity, get some ESP8266 [hackaday.com] modules - those are WiFi modules with a user-programmable 80MHz 32-bit CPU that you can buy for $5. Throw in a Cortex-M0 as a slave device to control your I/O (which can be as cheap as $1 [digikey.com] in single quantities - yes, you can get a 32-bit CPU for $1 these days). That is what 2015 state-of-the-art silicon gets you to fit the task. A Raspberry Pi with a WiFi dongle is an order of magnitude more expensive and overpowered (
Re: a billion operat per second enough for cat wat (Score:3)
Where is the community for said platform? Does it give you a good example in a simple fashion? Or do I have to read reams of data sheets?
I've had to read data sheets for the Arduino but most of the stuff is easily available with plenty of examples to learn from. The cores of these processors have been around for years but until someone puts it in an easy to use package, only specialists will use it and specialists already know how to pick the best technology for a specific task.
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ESP8266 only became a "thing" last year, so the community [esp8266.com] is still growing. But the manufacturer is cooperating and is releasing open SDKs, and the hobbyist community is enthusiastic about it. I personally intend to use a bunch of them to automate things around my apartment, so I guess I'll find out just how good/bad it is.
That's for developing on the ESP8266 core itself - if you just want to use the default firmware, plug it into your existing microcontroller platform (e.g. Arduino) and you get wireless co
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Raspberry Pis are used primarily for very small tasks, controlling a few motors and lights in a haunted house gimmick, running cool Christmas lights, or an alarm system reading sensors once per second.
Actually those sound more like tasks for a simple microcontroller. Raspberry Pi can do way more complex things.
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Re:Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:4, Informative)
They arent, Its 4x A7 with Neon this time.
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It seems they just edited the article. It used to claim it was still ARM11.
Too bad Slashdot doesn't allow editing comments... oh well. I guess my first first post on /. will forever be a record of El Reg's poor reporting.
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Still ARM11, still a crappy CPU (Score:5, Informative)
No it isn't. It's a quad-core Cortex A7.
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TFA used to claim that it was still ARM11. They just edited it a few minutes ago. I stand transitively corrected.
I actually tried to look up any official announcements to corroborate the fact that it was still ARM11 before posting my first comment (because it just felt so dumb), but found none, no mentions of the new chip on Broadcom's site, nothing. I guess they trusted El Reg with the scoop and they screwed it up.
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I expect a quad core CPU will improve things somewhat for media playing - the original Pi just about managed it assuming you had the codecs unlocked but it didn't have the juice to power the UI of something like MythTV so it could really chug at times. I wonder if sticking with Broadcom is
Too late, but not entirely too little (Score:5, Informative)
It's a quad-core Cortex A7, so very firmly ARMv7.
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Android has an NDK to develop native apps that target the CPU instruction set directly. Unreal Engine for Android isn't written in Java.
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That is the problem with the Pi's, the GPU is the main processor so booting has to get that going before the ARM is online. Comm with some devices is only through the GPU / The Blob. That keeps some very nice lightweight open source OS from running on it.
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Didn't Broadcomm publish a whole bunch of specs on their GPU a while back specifically for the Raspberry Pi project? The biggest problem with the Pi in my eyes is that (for some BS reasons that don't seem entirely clear to me) it still needs a closed source bootloader on the VideoCore side of things in order to actually use the thing.
If Broadcomm were smart they would publish the specs (or code) for that too and make the Broadcomm chip-set in the Pi the first mobile SoC with a complete set of specs availabl
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Broadcom kinda hired Eric Anholt, former Intel open source GPU driver developer
http://anholt.livejournal.com/ [livejournal.com]
Re:What about the GPU? (Score:5, Informative)
They released all the docs for the GPU, drivers are on their way http://dri.freedesktop.org/wik... [freedesktop.org] https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I've since sold off all my Pi gear to enthusiasts, but the three killers for me at the time (Model B) were:
USB dropouts, as you mentioned.
Memory card corruption (occasionally, known-good cards, but what a bummer).
GPU crashes on certain videos.
Plus I could get more ADC pins elsewhere. But I did tell myself I'd revisit the Pi when the 2 came out - the community size is much better.
I'm hopeful, but these problems are well-known, so I'd love to see them addressed directly.
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The B+ is supposed to have addressed the USB problems. Can't say because I haven't bought one yet, I still have two of the original model Bs.
USB dropout is a BCM2835 fault, not fixable (Score:5, Informative)
The BCM2835 which is present on all the previous Pi boards contains a half-baked USB controller core which is the cause of all the USB event dropout problems. It expects realtime response from the ARM11 to handle USB's split transactions within the required 1ms response window of USB. The ARM11 cannot always meet that response spec, and so the USB user experiences a dropout.
More details are given in this post [slashdot.org] and there are plenty of threads on the raspberrypi.org forum in which the Raspberry Pi Foundation's engineers confirm the hardware fault inside the BCM2835 SoC.
The Pi range of boards have had many other USB-related problems fixed in recent versions, especially those associated with the very poor power supply circuitry of the first release. On the whole the situation is much better, but the core USB dropout problem is not fixable because it's part of the BCM2835 chip.
Hopefully the new BCM2836 in RPi 2 does not use the same half-broken USB controller core as the BCM2835.
Keep your fingers crossed.