Raspberry Pi vs MK802
jeffhoogland.blogspot.com
jeffhoogland.blogspot.com
The AllWinner Clearly has the better CPU with a Cortex A8 compared to the ARM1176JZF-S. It's almost twice the speed clock for clock on general code and more so if using things like NEON.
Video decode seems sufficient in each one since both can decode 1080p and then some.
GPU is rather hazy. The BCM2835 has VideoCore IV, The A10 has a single core Mali-400 I haven't seen any real head to head comparisons on straight GPU performance. If anyone knows of a comparison I'd be interested. If anyone has both devices running similar OSs I'd be very appreciative of some benchmarking.
For IO the Raspberry PI wins over the MK802, but the CubieBoard is another A10 device that is better yet again. http://linux-sunxi.org/Cubieboard . The biggest advantages of the CubieBoard are SATA and EtherNet (the R-Pi Ethernet is USB based) VGA is also available from the headers which is a big plus if you are aiming for older monitors.
Except, even with drivers, some movies still lag, for example, try http://www.auby.no/files/video_tests/h264_1080p_hp_4.1_40mbp...
Yes it's high profile 40mbps 1080p. But then again, if you want to play files from a box and all you do is play baseline blurays, then I don't see the point. I believe such a box should play "anything" HD.
The page also report their own tests http://www.auby.no/files/video_tests/
Bird certainly lags to death on my exynos 4210
A lot of the cheaper ARM SOC's folks are talking about have decode blocks (either in CPU or GPU) that can only do H.264 high profile @20mbps or 30mbps at best.
By comparison, intel hd graphics (even the oldest ones) will support decode of at least 40mbps of high profile h.264 (and newer ones often have no problem with 100mbps). Nvidia's purevideo hd and ATI's UVD can do the same, obviously.
Realistically, if you want a box that plays stuff out of the mainstream (and honestly, mainstream is 20-30mbps or less right now) you have to pay more for it.
Let's say I wanted to install Debian on the Raspberry Pi. I can go to http://www.raspbian.org/ and find a healthy project and well-organized documentation. What if I wanted to install it on the MK802? After a lot of googling and skimming results, I'd probably end up at http://linux-sunxi.org/Debian if I wanted to build the bootloader, kernel, and root filesystem myself or http://forum.doozan.com/list.php?6 if I trusted somebody else's work. The experience is very different.
This is why I'm hoping http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod succeeds. I think what they plan to do is exactly what the A10 platform needs to succeeed with hobbyists-
Maintain a community forum and wiki
Provide source for everything we create and share it on Github.
Provide a package repository for the PengPods.
Provide prebuilt images, with updates as available.
Provide tools, scripts and guides as we go.Here's a fun excerpt from http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221 :
Liz: ... keep trying to rustle up some outrage if it gives you a kick; I’d recommend finding something else to do soon, though. We don’t want you developing an ulcer.
Developer: Am I allowed to be outraged by the fact that it’s not really open, since I see no mention of actual documentation for the hardware? Or by this: http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ ? Can I get outraged by that?
Liz: Well you /could/, but you wouldn’t half look silly.
Nice going, Liz. That's right, anyone who actually wants to make full utilization of the hardware they paid for is 'silly' and we're only rustling up outrage for 'kicks' when you post a press release announcing how open source you really aren't.
Here, have a nine page thread of people complaining they were banned under weak, insane excuses like 'concern trolling' because they dared to mention things like 'your supplier isn't sending me anything' and 'My SD card gets corrupted when I unplug the device sometimes': https://www.element14.com/community/thread/20081
It's got massive hype since it's a $35 Beagleboard, but otherwise it's bringing nothing new to the table that hasn't been done by others and increasingly done better by other devices.
The remainder of the situation seems to be a collection of people more interested in their awards, hype and press releases than their actual users and developers on their forums. Frankly, there's quite a few ARM SoC boards out there with GPIO pins and all the bells and whistles of the Pi, many of them have even beefier hardware. None of them have this horrible baggage and all of them will run the same software for the most part.
So that's great that many people are going to target this device, but it's hardly an 'exclusive port' to the RPi. The real bet to back is Linux on ARM.
Personally, this board gets me much more hot than the RPi and prices are only going to come down on similar future boards: http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
It sucks a bit. I don't see it changing anytime soon. That's most of the reason I supported Parallela. That promises to be open, it probably won't be as much power as a nice GPU, but I want to compute with that hardware, and more problems will fit better. Plus I won't get trapped in some flawed API that has weird black boxes bugs and unpredictable performance issues.
They are optimizing for the British education market, not for some ideal libertarian education market in Somalia that can ignore patents.
And licensing agreements are a bitch. It might be against Broadcom's license with MPEG-LA to give enough info about implementing MPEG-2 regardless of jurisdiction.
Let them eat cake!
It's not like they have a choice. Since MPEG-2 is covered by patents (which are underwritten by customs, police and eventually armies), they cannot really provide an MPEG-2 capable product without permission from the patent owners.
And those patent owners demand $2/chip or so; So RPi, instead of passing it on to all users, whether they need it or not, pass it through only to those who are interested. It's >5% of the cost for the Model B, and >8% of the cost of the Model A. I'm sure if they included it as part of the base, there would be people outraged that they did as well.
Despite the best intentions, limited resources and (despite what some people who have no experience with actually producing and selling hardware think) spectacular success - there will always be people who think they can do better. To those people I say: I'm here to cheer for you when you actually do. Until then, I will join Eben in ignoring you (or even Liz in mocking you silly)
ARM chips come with closed source android drivers because those bring money. That's that. If you think GNU/Linux "victory" would be about making money, you'd be sorely mistaking (or else, you can go the ubuntu way and beg for donations, include proprietary apps, track users, and wonder where you failed)
And further - you may dislike Liz' handling of things. SO DON'T BE THEIR USER!. Linus Torvalds is about a hundred times worse to his users and fellow developers on public mailing lists. And you know what? He's gotten more and better stuff done thanks to that, compared to any polite project manager I've ever known.
Liz/RPiFoundation (and Linus) may antagonize people here and there - but I suspect that thanks to how they handle things, I think the gain (in users that can afford or find the product useful) to pain (antagonized user/developer) is well above 1,000:1 (perhaps even 100,000:1) which makes it totally justified - in fact, the preferred course of action.
edit: better wording.
I don't see many pictures on the Raspberry Pi Foundations pages - which Tumblr seems to be 99% made out of.
Developer: Remember who you are talking to here, and i am currently talking to the developer of the freedreno driver, and the guy REing the tegra, and we are all shaking our heads in disgust over the brashness of this announcement.
Liz: > Remember who you are talking to here Seriously?
Developer: Definitely... Google me.
Yes, R-Pi folks should have clarified that while opening the userland code was definitely a good move (which was the topic of the blog post btw), the videocore blob was still closed - and probably will never be open-sourced.
And while this is fine for most people, some folks will still be frustrated - and they can always vote with their time and money. It'd be much more effective than writing self-aggrandizing comments, regardless their individual achievements.
Let's face it, it's a design trade-off, not the foundation's choice. You know, Broadcom-trade secrets-yadda yadda. May change one day, but I wouldn't bet on it.
HN, as usual, had way more civilized comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692401
Yes, the guy was out there -- but does waving chat logs like this around for people to gawk at really belong on the front page of a supposedly educational foundation's website? It sure did get linked around, so it's certainly advertising... but by no means is it educational and it's still very much the general antagonistic and lulzy behavior I've come to expect from these people and how they choose to run their community and maintain their web presence.
At the end of the day, the RPi only feels 'educational' flavored for marketing for me. It may not for you, that's cool too. People are going to do educational things with the RPi, but they're going to do it in spite of how the RPi Foundation are running things since now the meme of this board being 'educational' has been cemented.
... Though given they're already talking about on their own blog[1] how the board may not be around in a few years, I suspect we'll have another 'educational' board (with a new Broadcom chip, natch) to purchase for cheap. It'll be just as revolutionary as the others on the market at the time, I'm sure.
It's a post on "the blog" which for 24 hours or so (if post timestamps are to be believed), was the first thing anyone looking at the website saw.
And yes, since they are a non-profit, and some idiot is wasting their time trying to weasel out a $35 gift from them, I don't see a problem with shaming to prevent recurrence.
The rpi foundation IS a non-profit. As someone with some experience in hardware design and in entrepreneurship, I see EVERYTHING they've done is along those lines. Your snark and disbelief of that is completely unwarranted, and speaks volume about you, rather than about the rpi foundation. They have some ideals and principals, but are extremely pragmatic, and if that bothers you (as it seems to do), you are welcome to ignore them.
They're STILL on track, as far as I know, to produce a $25 board that's useful for education. If you think they are chasing profits, please explain how that is possible. Their $35 model is STILL significantly cheaper than any comparable commercial offering (I found one vendor in Singapore offering an MK802 for $46, the rest are >$50; cubieboard is $50 but not yet available; RPi is available from multiple vendors including for-profit ones for $35-$40).
If they tried to make more profit, they would have priced it higher - demand definitely supports a higher priced point. And by NOT chasing profits, they've actually brought down the prices from anyone else.
While I also felt strange to see such a Michael Arrington-move on the homepage, it was impossible to not laugh about the idiotic effort of this guy trying to convince them to get a freebie. And what a persistent prankster he was. Towards the end it became more obvious that probably he was just a kid, having fun and practicing his social engineering skills.
Anyway, shame on him, for wasting people's time. Try picking one of the big guys next time, that have deep pockets and vast call centers (and lawyers) to deal with idiots. And btw, TI, Microchip, Renesas, all have trial programs for hobbyists, no social engineering required.
Again, I don't want to speak on behalf of R-Pi or Liz, but I don't think she's doing this just for lulz, at all. It's really a pain to manage social communities, especially tech ones. 1% of the users cause 90% of your nightmares, so you need to have a bit of humor (even if it's dark humor; it's a British foundation after all).
http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/
It's rather nice, but they picked an expensive (>$2000) TV with an embedded x86 PC designed for digital signage applications.
Since the bottom has fallen out of the consumer LCD TV market, you can now get a brand-name 46-inch LCD TV for about $600. A low profile wall mount will set you back less than $40. One of the various MK802 incarnations will set you back less than $80, and if you pick the right stick incarnation and TV, the TV can power the stick through the HDMI port, meaning that you just give the TV power, plug the stick into the TV, and you're done.
One caveat with the MK802-alike Android sticks is that there are a lot of variants out there, and not all of them use a chipset that's properly (GPL'd drivers w/ source code available) supported by Linux proper. Also, the feature set varies widely. But if you do your homework before buying, I have no doubts that a giant status dashboard thing that's functionally equivalent to Panic's could be created for under $700.
The GPIO pins and the fairly fast gpu for video rendering were secondary things.
The Raspberry Pi somehow or other really caught the zeitgeist at the right time. It isn't the only kid on the block doing what it is doing, even when you consider price, but it is by far the most widely known and thus there are huge network effects that make it a good device to be tinkering with.
This situation is quite similar to smaller microcontrollers where in the minds of many people that whole segment has become nearly synonymous with the Arduino despite the fact that there are many other options, some of them just as capable but far cheaper (eg. TI's MSP430 which you can buy for less than 5 bucks) and some about the same price but far more powerful.
Of course, once all the software, tutorials and/or hardware "shields" crop up for the mind-share winner, that platform certainly becomes the most convenient to hack on and then that popularity feeds on itself. In both cases hopefully the entry device serves as a gateway for the interested hacker, but not their final destination.
Can you point to others in the price range ($35) that come close? And from your intro above, I would guess "what it is doing" includes GPIO?
For learning to program I think I'd just go with a javascript scratchpad in a browser. Or for core concepts and less kludge, maybe just a node repl. I guess you could use a pi for that if you don't have a machine that you want to play with but that isn't why people are jazzed about the pi.
I think it can be summed us thusly: RPi is a project by people who grow up during the golden time of British personal computing - who are trying to reestablish the magic.
(Sure, you can use a USB hub, but then you're into another rats nest of cabling.)