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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that makes this thing a lot more interesting to me, if true. So many designs these days pair monster CPUs with underpowered GPUs it's almost embarrassing (especially as Apple continues to show that powerful GPUs are important for a good user experience). The 256 MB of RAM will be very constraining for any app trying to use all that power, though.

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The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of RAM and seems to do ok, as games like Uncharted and God of War show.

It does mean you'll need to be more careful and considerate of how you use that memory though (and admittedly, on a console like a PS3 the OS takes up much, much less space).

The PS3 has 256 MB system RAM and 256 MB dedicated video RAM. So it has twice as much RAM as the Raspberry Pi.

I'm aware of that, does the Raspberry Pi not have separate video ram? If not, that is my mistake - I didn't look closely and made an assumption. If it has a shared block of RAM (like the Xbox 360 Xenon, which has 512mb shared) then that is a significant difference - but still plenty to work wonders with.

Actually it has 512MB split into two pools for CPU and GPU.

>"The 256 MB of RAM will be very constraining for any app trying to use all that power, though."

My Archos 101 has 256MB RAM and runs Android suprisingly well. It only does 720p video playback though; full specs http://www.archos.com/products/ta/archos_101it/specs.html?co.... I'm not going to lie, it does tend to lag a bit; wonder how easy upgrading the RAM will be on the RPi.

The RasberryPi is using a BCM2835 SoC that has the RAM on the die. Basically not upgradeable without swapping out the whole chip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

And as a consumer (or a company that is not a "Broadcom partner") you can't buy the BCM2835 in any model so even if you could desolder the BGA you couldn't buy any replacement (or build your own boards).

The RAM isn't on the die, it is in a package that gets stacked on top of the SoC package. Still not going to be a simple upgrade though.

Sounds just like the Archos RAM limitation.

Personally I think the fairly low amount of memory is good and works well with their motive - to promote computer science education. If it had more, you could easily chuck massive frameworks and whatnot at it, but as there's not as much RAM then hopefully people learning with it will have to work a little closer to the bare metal. I'm sure things to make Raspberry Pi work 'easier' will arrive - and that's not necessarily a bad thing - but at least they'll be more constrained.

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