It costs $35 and comes with ethernet, wifi, and a quad-core processor.
Furthermore, it's fully supported in linux.
That's terribly awesome for what it is.
A decade ago you had to spend 50x that amount of cash to get a laptop with those specs, without linux support.
No matter how you cut it, the Raspberry Pi 3 is not bad from any angle. At all.
Truly awesome, yes indeed .. and from my perspective, completely out of left-field. Fact is, this kind of evolution rewards those who invest in the platform, and is definitely a key indicator of a successful platform strategy, wherein the benefits of standardization and compatibility, applied along Moorse curve, results in the platform becoming more and more useful. Really great that they're able to maintain the price-point, the form-factor, GPIO compatibility, and so on; all the while pushing the platform into "workstation-class" territory, bit by bit.
The only thing that would make it better .. truly, the only thing .. is if we had the ability to go up to 16gigs of RAM. RAM is lacking, but still the machine is awesome. (I'll just assume that the next $35 investment in the rPi dream that I'll make, will fix this issue..)
I've ordered rPi 3, I'm a true believer, for it to sit atop a bundle of stacks of every other rPi released so far .. and, it seems, the rPi revolution is beneficial to everyone.
I mean, this class of workstation device, for a Linux desktop system, for .. ~$50 worth of investment .. phenomenal!
I hope we see more stuff like this, and it forces the mobile power-horses to re-consider bundling the compiler onboard.
Fun Fact: with this new rev of rPi, I can develop software for the fleet-of-rPi's like never before, i.e. it'll be usable enough to just ditch the cross-compiler and other bunk needed to maintain dominance in a tech-soaked garden of various walls, smokes and mirrors .. so instead of giving my customers an App-store link this year, I think I'll just put the working system in the mail.
Bonanza!
Yeah, I keep thinking about how a tiny device with oodles of RAM would be such a killer Redis or static asset server. Or even a killer database server, for read-heavy loads.
Although am not even sure if that would be possible in the near future - for SoC's like the BCM2837, the RAM is on the same chip as the CPU+GPU, right? I don't even know if it would be feasible to build gobs of RAM into a package like that.
Of course, RPi's are still freaking awesome, and I am happy they exist.
There is apparently an architectural limit in the Videocore 4 that limits it to 1Gbyte.
The C2 goes on sale in like one or two days for $40. (edit: You can buy in now on HK's website.) Kind of a childish move for the RPi Foundation to be making so much noise about their new board right now, actually. (edit: Okay, benbenben makes a fair and accurate point. Several boards, including the first, have been released at the end of February.)
* Not entirely just like. It's an Amlogic chip instead of Broadcom or Allwinner. Amlogic is one of the few without blatant GPL abuse.
It's their fourth birthday, a pretty good time to release a new/updated product, no?
That's not all that much of a differentiator. The Banana Pi Pro only costs $12.89 more on Amazon. It doesn't have built-in wifi and it's dual- instead of quad-core, but it does have real SATA and better video. If I weren't perfectly happy with the Odroid U3 I've been using as a Linux desktop for the last couple of years, I'd probably lean toward that instead of the RP3, but that's not the point. The point is that SATA would be a nice addition, and not unreasonable at this approximate price point, even if the RP3 is already awesome.