Turbocharged Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed | Hacker News Reader

Turbocharged Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed

theregister.co.uk

573 pointsmmastrac201 comments

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What's the same:

- Same form factor as the model B+ (your enclosures and daughter boards should still fit).

- Same full size HDMI port

- Same 10/100 Ethernet port

- Same CSI camera port and DSI display ports

- Same micro USB power supply connection

What has changed:

- A new turbocharged Broadcom BCM2836 900MHz quad-core system-on-chip with performance at least 6x that of the B+.

- 1GB of RAM

Source: http://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-2-...

Under the "Same" column, it looks like you need to add "Same price - $35".

I stocked up on B+s over Christmas - oh well...

The "at least 6x" performance claim should be "at least 3x" by the way, and even that is an estimate, not a guarantee. The 3x is on a single thread comparison, the 6x is on a somewhat synthetic multicore benchmark test.

Can you return them? If its less than 30 day...?

In the EU, the consumer rights directive allows you to return most goods bought online up to 14 days after delivery.

The Cortex-A7 is also faster per-core, per-clock than the old ARM11 processor, and the clock is higher. So with 4x the amount of cores, some multiplier for the per-core, per-clock stats, and 1.28x the clock, 6x makes some (marketing) sense.

You might get 6x on some multicore benchmarks but for most applications in real life it's safe to say you're unlikely to see that.

> I stocked up on B+s over Christmas - oh well...

Got one for Christmas. Bought a case and a second one since. I knew it'd get outspecc'd someday, just wasn't expecting it THIS soon...

I bought on on Dec-31. Three weeks later, the bundle that I bought dropped in price.

Amazon price-matched it and then less than two weeks later...

What's the same: Broadcom is still the non-datasheet-releasing, our-chips-implementing-standard-phy-spec functionality are subject to manhattan-project secrecy, assholes.

Why are they required to release those datasheets?

They're not required, but (thankfully) we're not required to use hardware from vendors that don't do that.

There might come a point where essentially nothing on the market is open anyway, however. Meaning we are required.

They're not, but it's been common practice in their industry for decades, and it's generally seen as beneficial to OEMs and users to have access to datasheets before purchase. This is why it's also commonplace for most chip manufacturers to offer free samples, even of chips upwards of $20 list price. Most of them even publish enough information to develop hardware and software to interact with these chips even without one on hand.

That Broadcom doesn't do this is very atypical.

Ok. I find it rather rude to call a company 'assholes' for doing something that is 100% within their rights. They're releasing a chip that powers a relatively cheap fairly powerful computer, have supported the effort in as many ways as they could without giving up their competitive edge (when you're in a leadship position it is sometimes quite risky to open up too far), nobody forces anybody to buy the product and lastly you can of course always fire up the disassembler and do it the hard way.

You are 100% within your rights to not tip at restaurants in the US and yet I believe most people would consider you an asshole. If someone does something that benefits themselves at the expense of others when it's socially assumed to act in another way, many would call a person an 'asshole'. Seems like a similar situation if it is normal practice in the industry.

I think aswanson is simply expressing his feelings. Broadcom has garnered goodwill from being involved with the Raspberry Pi foundation. Goodwill, I must add, from a broad swath of people who are not too technically inclined. Yes, the computer (or device if you're lacking generosity) is a god-send for those without the capacity to buy an Intel/AMD-based PC, but let's not kid ourselves: the device is less open than a PC was even 20 years ago. Which begs the question, in what capacity is the foundation moving computing forward? That's where I lose goodwill even for the foundation. Sure, they did something special, that really made compute affordable. But that was years ago. Now they need to make it open, so anyone, not just students, can answer probing questions about how the device works, and in so doing be able to make a Raspberry Pi device, or something totally different, for a whole new generation.

All this said, if you want cheap and software open, go with the Odroid C1 (China really is the future, and in this case a Korean firm is acting as the intermediary to Chinese silicon.) And if you want fully open, TI's Beaglebone. Good, solid, open, American.

The Odroid C1 uses an SoC from Amlogic, which is also American.

Mea culpa. I see their SOCs on all these Chinese media-boxes that I just assumed they were Chinese. How did an American company break the Chinese market like that? Impressive! I should do research on who's running that ship...

> All this said, if you want cheap and software open, go with the Odroid C1

According to http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php the Odroid C1 uses a Mali-450 MP2 GPU. This is at least as closed as the VideoCore IV used in the Raspberry Pi.

So is it possible to get an Odroid C1 from Hardkernel now? I put in an order for one in December, and they canceled my purchase and said they stopped shipping to the US due to reports of missing packages. They said to order from ameridroid.com, which isn't served over HTTPS, and when you get to the checkout, you're taken to https://04622216-5b1d-11e4-8b60-14feb5da1938.mysimplestore.c....

"We designed our storefront to be indistinguishable from something resembling an sslstrip attack in action" leads to an "I guess I'll have to do without, then" response.

Whatever they are or aren't doing on hardware openness, Broadcom are doing a lot for open software with the Pi platform. That's quite a lot there, anyway.

Dead on. Those pricks cost me about 5 weeks of progress at a startup because they didnt provide drivers for linux or a register set, much less a description. All because some clueless hardware guy used their chip because it was 'pin compatible'. Unless you are Apple or Dell, do NOT do a design with their chips.

When somebody pulls a dick move that they're totally entitled to pull, they're being an asshole. When they're not entitled to, we call it a crime.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what a disassembler has to do with datasheets?

I think he means that if no datasheet is available, you can try to reverse engineer it by using, say, a disassembler.

But a dissembler doesn't produce the same information that a datasheets provides? Unless he means to physically disassemble, but that isn't very easy.

Indeed. But perhaps enough to write an (incomplete?) open source driver?

I can see how you might think that seeing as how a lot of manufacturers in the low cost and hobby markets are quite liberal with their datasheets . but it is not uncommon in regards to the higher end soc companies like marvel,qualcom or in this case broadcom.

"Low cost and hobby market" companies like Intel, TI, NXP etc..?

they aren't required, but without it, the few hobbyist trying to make Linux work on it will have to devote 10x hours instead of x. that is all fine for broadcom. but you're doing a disservice to those developers and to you by supporting and popularizing this board, because if you supported a open one you would now have 10 chips with Linux support instead. or some other feature you are waiting or something so cool and futuristic that you can't even imagine will never happen because those folks were doing the tedious task of supporting a closed platform that unfortunately became popular.

Except that Broadcom released "full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license" [1], enough to enable a blob-free graphics driver. Code has already been committed to Mesa [2].

That is a lot more than you can say about the PowerVR core in the Beaglebone advocated by another response to this post.

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_d...

Of course you're referring to me. Arguing the whole openness of the video driver is a dead end [1]. If you want an open video driver use Intel, or AMD and be done with it.

Give me a hand-cranked universal Turing machine and I've basically got the same device as a RPi. The only difference, it's cheap, and I don't have to get a workout hand-cranking it. Video is just a (semi-)fixed functional unit. Sure, it'd be nice to have open drivers, but so would having the RTL of the processor, and the netlist and gerber of the board. Then they could actually talk about teaching kids something they actually couldn't learn with just having access to a hand-cranked universal Turing machine.

The fact that the foundation and Broadcom get their free goodwill from their claim of "for-the-sake-of-the-children" is the real source of my ire. Look at how many references to "industry" the article quotes from representatives of the foundation. Like the embedded SOM has anything at all to do with education, or the continuance of production of older models. Please...

[1] http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eZd0IYJ7J40

Do you think it is feasible to release a similarly priced, similarly capable device with completely open hardware?

The RPi has sold immensely to home users, but also in education. The foundation is also open to criticism and has shown in the past that they are willing to change their production when given the opportunity. They have moved most of their production to the UK for example, whereas the first boards were all manufactured off shore.

As much as they are "open to criticism", I very strongly doubt that they are going to use anything other than Broadcom.

Do you think it is feasible to release a similarly priced, similarly capable device with completely open hardware?

https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-...

Certainly not as widely known as the RPi, but I'd attribute that more to a general lack of marketing/"presence" in education.

That doesn't meet the (absurdly high) openness standard of "RTL of the processor" mentioned by throwaway000002.

My, overly-impassioned, exaggerated point is that the RPi is no better that many other competing devices on the market and should me measured solely on technical/business merit. The popularity of the device has spawned a product category of itself. However, at this point in time, claiming something about education is total rubbish. Take the old Pi, run ARMv7 QEMU on it et voila you have the new Pi. There is nothing new to learn, to grow, to probe questions about. The GPIO of the device could just as easily be be provided by a USB breakout board, etc, etc. Cypress had a $4 PSOC prototype board and if anyone (especially Cypress) bothered to develop open-source tooling for it, it would have be a far more useful device to learn from.

(As an aside: thank you to HNer asb and colleagues for the lowRISC project. Also, thank you to people like "bunnie" and "xobs" for Novena. These are real people, with real projects working with the best of intentions.)

It pleases me to see you mention the PSoC 4. I think it's a highly underrated educational tool due to the software stack used to develop on it. If they were to open up the platform I know several places that would love to use it when teaching kids about hardware and software development.

I think you've missed what layer the education is targeted at: software, especially Python but also Scratch, SonicPi, and so on. The hardware stuff is at the "turn on LED with GPIO" super-introductory level.

Edit: Eben Upton is also a real person?

Eben Upton and the foundation should rightly be lauded for the RPi Model A. That was 3 years ago. What purpose does this update serve? If it's the "developing world", then you haven't made the device any cheaper, and more functional competitors at similar price-points have existed for at least a year. As for the "developed world", I could have bought a Chromebox for $150 on Black Friday. I'm sure a school could easily negotiate that price and have a device that easily has >6x the functionality (and far more open thanks to tireless work of the coreboot team and Googlers working with Intel on minimizing the closed bits).

What again is the point of the RPi2? What new thing does it bring to the table that an at most $5 set of GPIO pins, in the physical form of the Pi connector, off a USB plug with an API can't bring to a basic PC?

The core target is unchanged - kids in the UK. The exact functionality level isn't nearly as critical as the standardisation of the system and its community support. Updating it keeps it competitive so people don't fret about being stuck on old technology.

What a Pi brings over a PC is ownership, stability, and freedom from the usual risks of breaking a PC. You can fiddle with any of the software on a Pi and always get it back by replacing the SD card. PCs are vulnerable to tinkering and inadvisibly installed software.

This conversation reminds me of http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip... : "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

"... and dual-core Mali 400 GPU"

Do you really claim that the Mali 400 GPU is more open than the VideoCore IV?

It would be difficult in the near term. With lowRISC (http://www.lowrisc.org), some of us are working towards a complete open source SoC (i.e. the RTL is available under a permissive open source license). Although our longer term goals include being an acceptable SoC for a phone or tablet, the first iteration won't feature a GPU.

To respond to jvdh, yes it is possible. Others have mentioned the more capable Allwinner based Olimex devices.

And if this really is an issue of "Buy Britain" why isn't the device based on Bristol based Xmos silicon. Now there's something that's a really neat platform.

In short, the RPi is an inexpensive enough device that a lot of hobbists can buy on a whim and proceed to install and reinstall various flavours of linux on to marginally satisfy their sense of somehow being "hackers". As I said in my initial post to this announcement, the work of the foundation in making a cheap computer a reality has been totally ground-breaking.

Now everything has been turned into at best a marketing exercise. Now there's news of RPi2 as a Windows IoT platform, with requisite Windows machine for dev work. Will wonders cease to amaze...

I started out when you had to pay hundreds of dollars to get even a C compiler (for MS-DOS). I amused myself by hex editing COM files (because I figured out that for some reason it worked better than EXEs when randomly changing stuff) and using "debug" to assemble simple programs. I wanted to make EXEs and I didn't know how, and MS BASIC didn't make them for reasons I didn't understand. I didn't know where to get MASM that the few public library books I could find were on about. Then I got on a BBS with a program called Telix and got something called Turbo Pascal, and my life kinda changed. Writing directly to segment B800...

And then a few later Linux came on the scene and I discovered the magic of having GCC just there waiting for you. But this had to happen at school, after school hours because I had a 8088 at home, and I needed a 386 which thankfully my teacher allowed me to set up a dual boot for...

I will _never_ _ever_ allow computing to be made inaccessible to my future generations to understand and learn from. I don't want to drone on about this issue, but proprietary is fine. Making money is fantastic, necessary, and a beautiful indication of the value you bring.

But putting people in a prison of no understanding is not at all okay.

The irony is that the Pi comes from someone who has exactly that kind of childhood hacking background who wants to replicate it for everyone else. It's the opposite of a "prison of no understanding". Holding out for free-to-RTL hardware is allowing the best to be the enemy of the good.

Beaglebone can be at least booted without non-free blobs, so it can be 100% free if you don't need to use 3D acceleration. Raspberry Pi cannot - even now with free GPU drivers, you still cannot get Linux working without providing non-free firmware blob to it first.

Open or not... I want a working DSI or I'll go with something else with eDP.

They may be changing a little bit, slowly. They're not used to this sort of thing, at all.

This is actually a big step: this wasn't just SoC repurposed for the Pi, this SoC was created for the Pi2.

There are a lot of details missing about the VC4, that's true. They could still publish a lot more of those than they have. We should be given enough to start the ARMs, warm the caches, talk to the devices and manage, start a kernel, even without video. The architecture means that the GPU plays the host role, however, so Linux is pretty much postboxing things to it asking it to do things when it comes to the devices - this complicates things, because that means the GPU firmware is probably going to have to be a bit more than a simple shim to get by. They can't just open-source all their side of the firmware either - it's based on a commercial RTOS, ThreadX. That's why they hired a guy to do a rewrite.

Arguably still better than NVIDIA. <g> Also better than MediaTek and the like - the usual way you get anything out of them is someone steals it (back).

What about power consumption? I know it is the same power supply (5V, 1A), but this doesn't mean it uses the same amount of power...

The official power supply has 2A.

Will Mathematica still ship with it and will the 6x performance increase make it be actually usable? What's the per-core increase?

Real-world max for single-thread speedup is probably the 3x quoted for the cache-busting SunSpider benchmark, with around 1.5x being more common. In terms of issue width, the new core is only a modest improvement as the Cortex-A7 is largely single-issue.

It will continue to be available, but I'm not sure what the performance increase is. There'll be a blog post on walkingrandomly.com coming in a few days - a guy who benchmarked it when it first came out. See http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=5220

here's a comparison with the correct information - https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-2-mo...

"... Best of all, the Pi 2 keeps the same shape, connectors and mounting holes as the Raspberry Pi B+ ..."

Phil, does this means the case (model A+) used in the 'Touch Pi' will be modified to fit the Pi2 at some stage?

cf: https://learn.adafruit.com/touch-pi-portable-raspberry-pi & https://learn.adafruit.com/3d-printed-raspberry-pi-b-plus-en...

Interesting to see a Broadcom logo and chip markings visible on the CPU now.

Love 'em or hate 'em, I suspect Broadcom are very happy about this as those chip markings are prime marketing real estate.

Considering the phenomenal success of the previous Raspberry Pi units this probably formed part of the negotiations for the CPU price.

There are of course other considerations such as trace lengths and availability of packages for both the CPU and LPDDR2 but that logo being directly in the hands of the engineers of tomorrow makes a big difference.

The previous models used a PoP (Package-on-Package) stack of the CPU and SDRAM and now they've moved to discrete SoC and DDR2 packages (with the DDR2 chip now on the underside of the PCB).

One of the announcement posts said "this Broadcom chip will be available for sale subject to meeting MOQ". So I'm expecting someone will do a kickstarter to buy 10k of them and reship them as singles. No longer doing POP moves it from "nope" territory into something the average small assembly house should be able to cope with. Not that you need to do this given that the compute module exists, but I'm sure someone will want to do it.

I wish they would release one with DMA based gigabit Ethernet. That always seems to be the bottleneck for me.

It would have been much sense with the newer CPU. My old Pi hiccups at very high IO over ethernet, specially when I am processing the incoming streams.

Same here; I've found the CPU to generally be the limiting factor, with IO (network or disk) only sometimes coming into play. The somewhat faster CPU could definitely help in this regard, but doesn't the network jack go through a USB 2.0 bus? If that's the case, that's probably the limiting factor.

Couldn't agree more, the current USB powered Ethernet speed is the biggest bottleneck of RPi.

Wonder if they fixed USB problems (dma/internal bus bottlenecking or something). Info about quad core CPU is a bit sketchy, either its one of Cortex cores, or BCM tweaked ARM11/bumped L1 cache to max 64KB value and/or added proper L2 cache.

So many unknowns.

Edit:

Milhouse, Team-Kodi Member: "ARMv7 and NEON instructions" http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=217040&pid=1911780#p....

WOOOHOOO now we are cooking, Broadcom is back in business, first hiring real flesh and blood open source GPU drivers developer, now this. Next thing you know they will open up DSI port specification or something :o

Some good detail here from one of the RPi / Broadcom engineers:

http://jamesrandominfo.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/raspberry-pi-2...

Why would anyone buy this over the much more powerful ARMv7 odroid-C1 for $35 that has been out for months now?

There are many reasons.

The large community that is involved with the Pi. The large number of tutorials, and guides available. The incredible amount of accessories available and customized for the Pi. The Pi has the momentum. The odroid-C1 may be fantastic, but it's the first time I've ever heard of it.

I hesitate to chime in, but in the interest of completeness:

The Odroids all use Mali graphics. Mali isn't particularly worse than the Pi's VideoCore IV, but it's not particularly better either...

And the BeagleBone vs Pi comparison here is worth reading: http://section9.choamco.com/2012/07/beagleboard-vs-beagleboa...

P.S. I double-checked that the Odroids are all shipping with Mali. Happy to be proven wrong though. Does anyone know of similar-priced dev boards from Qualcomm? Qualcomm's Adreno is definitely the most interesting GPU architecture in this space. Adreno is an anagram of Radeon.

other dev boards:

"Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs" (Dec 31, 2014)

http://linuxgizmos.com/ringing-in-2015-with-40-linux-friendl...

"Nine sub-$50 SBCs that challenge the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black: 86Duino, A10-OLinuXino-Lime, Arduino TRE, Banana Pi, BPi D1, HummingBoard-i1, Odroid-C1, Orange Pi, and pcDuino3 Nano"

Wow, some of those names... lots of *duino and Pi. And anyone would wonder why people choose Arduino and RPi, because everything else is an imitation.

Nobody got fired for buying RPi?

Basically. When you buy RPi, you are getting access to a vast community of knowledge and guides, which is very useful for hardware projects.

"... Why would anyone buy this over the much more powerful ARMv7 odroid-C1 ..."

It's not just the hardware you buy into. You also by default have the available operating systems, the software available for the OS and the community.

The Raspberry Pi is a platform optimized for and bundled with its community. The Raspberry Foundation can produce/license any conceivable number of these devices at the same price point. The difference of for example $35 vs $70 doesn't matter very much for individual buyers. It does matter when dealing with educational budgets and a desire for predictable spending. Even when a school/hobbyist course requires students to buy their own devices, even $5 differences can be a big deal.

The fixed price, high bulk, cooperation with education initiatives and governments, all translates to a relatively homogeneous, unfragmented "fleet" of devices, which just isn't the norm in small computers.

Beagle Bone, the Odroid series, and several other products are technically superior in most ways. But they don't have a comparable community size, and aren't focused on the educational sector as much. In some ways, these models attach to the Raspberry Pi community.

You've got it exactly. The whole thing is modeled on the original BBC computer learning project of 30 years ago. The physical Pi device is just a platform for the delivery of educational material. People miss this because most of the commentators here don't need the educational material as they're not schoolkids or educators.

The Foundation is doing this in a highly vertically integrated way because it gives them predictability and a guarantee that the hardware meets the educational needs and also the "marketing" needs of turning kids into enthusiasts. That's why Minecraft for the Pi is important, for example.

One important difference is cost - the BBC micros were expensive compared to their competition.

You know, one variation of the Raspberry Pi I'd like to see for the educational market, is a standard graphing calculator based on the Pi's internals. The reason: Even though I'm not convinced that graphical calculators really help students that much, many schools require them anyway. So why not take a (somewhat expensive) necessary device, and make it more functional when you plug in a keyboard/monitor?

I wonder what the price point could be of a device with a decent screen (somewhat better than the TI's), battery/charging, physical buttons, case, plus the Raspberry Pi?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984704

In addition to what others have said, the C1 isn't actually more powerful than the RPi2. They should perform about the same in terms of CPU. The main thing the C1 has over it is the GbE port.

It's a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU. ARM7, it's official: http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-2-on-sale/

And windows 10 will be on its list, imagine that.

"For the last six months [ RPi team has ] been working closely with Microsoft to bring the forthcoming Windows 10 to Raspberry Pi 2. Microsoft will have much more to share over the coming months. The Raspberry Pi 2-compatible version of Windows 10 will be available free of charge to makers.

Visit WindowsOnDevices.com today to join the Windows Developer Program for IoT and receive updates as they become available."

http://dev.windows.com/en-us/featured/raspberrypi2support

I wonder if Microsoft have helped in making the PI capable of running Windows 10, for the same price.

No, it's just Broadcom and the Raspberry Pi engineering team that made the product happen. At the point we knew Pi 2 would be happening, the conversation with MS started and they started work porting Windows to it - with a little help from our engineers.

- Ben from Raspberry Pi

It's actually ARMv7 not ARM7; but anyway ARMv7 means it will be able to run stock ARM Ubuntu.

Thanks for the catch.

Awesome!! I just wish they would release one with onboard Wifi instead of ethernet. I have no statistics to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that USB Wifi adapters would be the most common accessory.

It'd be great to have wifi on board, but ethernet is still important.

I use the onboard ethernet pretty constantly, mainly because I find the wireless to be finicky and hard to troubleshoot when you're running a headless setup. I can always plug in an ethernet cable, though...

Agree. However Finally I was able to keep an uptime greater than 2 months on my Pi by using a wifi dongle and a bunch of cron scripts to keep alive the connection when my router reboots or the dongle 'freezes' which seems is a common issue when using RPi of any kind :(

that's probably a bad dongle.

i connect my htpc via a Wi-Fi USB dongle as well. it runs both Linux and windows 7. and despite the os and drivers one model always hang after a day or so. another one, different model from same brand is online for months at a time.

it's mostly badly designed/tested hardware.

I was expecting a answer like "my dongle X just works on the Pi" :-) I do not doubt it is a problem with the hardware or the drivers, I just say it is a common problem with many dongle vendors specially in the Pi. I know I could buy a RPi-certified dongle, but I do not like wasting hardware if I can fix it just with a few scripts. No offense :)

WiFi on the Pi 'just doesn't work.'

You can get it working for a while, but it's nowhere near the reliability of standard domestic WiFi.

I've built various sensor/hardware projects and tried various dongles, and I've always had to switch back to a cabled connection.

I had that issue as well, where it would freeze if it transferred lots of data (as in, a large number of files in a dir would freeze it when doing ls on the terminal), and the problems went away with a higher-amperage power supply.

Depending on what you're trying to build, a Spark Photon might be a better fit for your project.

It's probably the economics of FCC/CE testing vs utility. The testing for unintentional radiators is onerous enough. If you add an intentional radiator, you trigger a whole lot more tests and a whole more cost.

Here is the official announcement:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-2-on-sale/

It has an ARMv7 processor.

The most important info is missing: does it still require a non-free blob to even just boot Linux?

Broadcom is still Broadcom.

It doesn't look like BCM is intending to release any more datasheets/programming information either, which is not surprising. There will probably never be any detailed information released, officially or otherwise, on any BCM SoCs, even after they're long EOL'd.

As far as openness is concerned the RPi is basically a smartphone/tablet SoC devboard, with most of the hardware proprietary - while its Chinese competitors (Allwinner, Mediatek, Rockchip, etc.) are officially quite closed too, the docs for many of their SoCs are available (admittedly leaked; but they seem to be turning a blind eye to it.) They're also at least a Cortex-A7.

I wonder how the RPi2 compares to this:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-...

Dual 1GHz A7s, 512MB, SATA, HDMI, USB, Ethernet (integrated on SoC, not through USB), fully open-source, in the same price range.

If only uploading the proprietary GPU firmware wasn't necessary to just launch the CPU, even at the cost of 3D acceleration and stuff like that, I'd be happy with it. It may even have reflashable closed blob inside - I know RMS wouldn't be happy with that, but I would. RasPi 1, however, required the user to provide a non-free blob on SD card, which is what I'm extremely unhappy with.

What does this really matter? A closed blob is a closed blob, it's not like the cpu itself isn't a closed blob. Now on the other hand, if the closed blob entails that functionality you expected can be taken away from you without your control, that's a different matter. Sure, I don't put it far beyond Broadcom, but that's a different matter.

bunnie describes the culture in Shenzen that allows for those leaked datasheets as "gongkai". He did a really awesome talk about it at [31c3]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msrTR3hNDQM

Or this: http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code...

Quad core, 1 GB. Released just 2 months ago. Same price as the Pi.

It's not just the hardware peripherals, tutorials, books and community count for a lot also.

Agreed. Among all the SBC forums, the Pi's is the friendliest community I've come across. You're almost guaranteed to get a reply and it's usually a useful one.

Try asking for something as simple as electrical specifications on the GPIO pins (Broadcom released the GPIO registers, but oddly enough not the electrical specs):

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=63362

Allwinner will give you their datasheets if you email them. Mediatek not so much (& no experience with Rockchip).

It is entirely possible this time around ARM will be bootstrapping whole thing.

How does this compare with the ODROID-C1?

http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code...

The odroid blows it away. I've had mine for about two months and love it.

How could you compare it against the brand new raspberry?

C1 came first, is available now and has a fully open GPU whereas the Pi still relies on Broadcomm's mostly proprietary chip.

C1 also allows you to add NAND directly to the board where the Pi is still limited to MicroSD. C1 also confirmed to not have the same bus limitation that plagues the first Pi an is unconfirmed to exist in Pi2.

C1 also has a built in RTC and a 5v Barrel Pin jack so you don't have to rely on MicroUSB for power.

http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php

It's simply much better thought out.

The C1 has a ARM Mali GPU, which is just as close as the rest of the GPUs available on ARM SoCs. The RPi GPU is the most open in that market in that it has some documentation and source code available.

The ODROID-C1 looks very nice. My main hesitations would be available drivers and community size. They may have drivers for everything, I don't know. It is nice to see that a somewhat recent kernel is available though (3.10).

I recently ported several projects I had from beaglebone black to an Olinuxino A10 Lime. A lot of stuff was relatively painless, but I was never able to get Node.js to install. I also got bit in the ass because I laid out and ordered PCBs assuming all of the SPI channels had drivers, when only one was there (of course, not the one I chose).

Embedded Linux constantly reminds you that you are standing on the shoulders of giants, and you can go from feeling like a wizard to feeling like an idiot real quick when some part of the system isn't working. That's where having the communities like beaglebone's and raspberry pi's really pay off.

Driver support in the Odroid C1 downloadable Ubuntu image is complete (as far as I can tell) and Ubuntu runs quite well.

I was unable to get X running on Arch Linux despite the drivers being available.

> not checking something because you fear the community is small

that's like voting for the two major parties "to not waste your vote". sigh.

For teachers one big issue is that you don't know if you can buy 100% compatible devices in a year's time in comparable conditions (price, bulk, availability etc). With Raspberry Pi you know you can.

I wouldn't be so sure about that - the article hints that they're trying to move away from the BCM2835, and in a few years' time the BCM2836 would probably suffer the same fate.

In any case I don't think I've seen anything from them about how long they'll continue making Pis, since they depend on Broadcom to provide the SoC.

On the other hand, AllWinner's answer about how long it will produce its SoCs... is surprising: https://olimex.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/how-long-olinuxino-w...

The answer does not really give people much reason to feel certain, on the other hand. How many OEMs will be able to continue to order 50k lots of A10's for very long? For that answer to give confidence, you will need to find an OEM you have reason to trust will be able to maintain that kind of volume.

They said they'll continue making the older models as long as people are buying them, so not anytime soon. The only model they have stopped making thus far is the original model A, which wasn't selling very well.

Yes, but such an "end of life" event will be relatively late and rare. The new boards have the same dimensions as the old ones and are very comparable, so even when the original B becomes unavailable, it's not too much of a transition.

ARMv6 still? I don't see how that's necessary to save on the BOM. I hope legacy code was not the deciding factor here.

I haven't been able to find what CPU core is used in the new chip. 3x sunspider performance is over the BCM2835 is claimed, which is not with the higher clocked ARM11 cores. They also reference limitations of the ARM11 core being gone. However, elsewhere in the article they still say it is an ARM11 core.

I was disappointed about that too.

That was pretty much my feel as well. So much for "now the CPU's fast"... yeah nope.

I thought the issue was mostly about lack of support?

meh, it'd be nice if it was more open from the CPU point of view but it kinda works out, plus "there's always hope". Can't make up for the lack of instructions and power.

Heck, both of them reasons while I like intel chips afterall. Their newest ones are pretty sexy too. I'm hoping sexy boards of similar form factor, and... oh yeah price.. err. yeah not going to happen :(

So in the meantime armv7+ boards are pretty decent (with similar random support, which, also mostly works out)

Is that really important for most buyers though?

It could be. ARMv7 means Android may finally get ported to the Pi.

Backward compatibility is a smart move sometimes. All the users can swap their design with the rpi2 in place. A nice feature. I'm all for newer ARM ISA, but I can understand (after some HNer explanation) v6 can be desirable.

AFAIK ARM ISAs are almost completely backwards-compatible so ARMv6 code should be fine on ARMv7; however, there does appear to be a few caveats: https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/ARMv7%20c...

Yeah, someone on reddit just told me that, I had no idea. Question's still open.

According to [1], these will be ARMv7 architecture Cortex-A7 cores. Looks like we'll know for sure only when the foundation announces a public release.

[1]: http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/02/02/raspberry-pi-2-model-...

A7 is also confirmed by one of XBMC devs

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=217040&pid=1911780#p...

Linked article on the Register has been updated to confirm ARMv7/NEON http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=v0LVywBi

nope, it's an arm 7, not an arm 6. https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-2-mo...

Any news if the Raspbery Pi 2 will have USB 3.0 ports? That seems to be a good selling point for the Odroid XU3 currently...

USB 3.0 ports would mean better performance as NAS or multimedia recording solution, as well as alleviating some of the current troubles with usb performance.

No chance.

Are they necessary? My Radxa (quadcore 1.7 GHz ARMv7) cannot exceed 6 MB/s read from HDD no matter how hard it tries with NTFS formatted disc (for comparison, Raspberry Pi A was doing about 600 kB/s max in a same configuration).

Both are far under USB 2.0 speed.

Well well. I'm going to hold off an wait until someone can benchmark this against the ODROID-C1, though, largely because the original Pi design had a few shortcuts and I'd like to avoid any teething issues (been using ODROIDs for a while, got full hardware support in Ubuntu and Android and don't have to put up with Debian 7.x).

Finally more power for graphics. I am seeing some interesting VR projects with the more horsepower, especially since VR is THE thing right now. And the pi is light enough for head-mounting!

I'd love to see this happen. But i think that's very wishful thinking, outside of some very simple scenes - my R9 270 struggles to maintain framerate with some DK2 demos and the pi's VC4 isn't remotely in the same league.

I think we will need to look at streaming scenes from a more powerful machine rather than creating them on board. I don't believe we are ready in any way to process that much information on such a small system at this time (HoloLens also gives out quite a lot of heat from its on board processor). The old pi had trouble streaming higher bitrates, though then we still have the same ethernet so I am not sure how much is possible.

ARMv7... so Ubuntu will finally run on this. No more hours of compiling software.

Yes and looks like Snappy Ubuntu Core is already ready to run on it as well: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/02/02/snappy-ubuntu-core-on...

The only place I've found to buy this thing so far is here: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-microcontroller-deve...

Where can I buy this thing in the US?

Any info on whether there will be an RPi-compatible Python library for accessing GPIO?

Nice update, and still at the $35 price point. Too bad it's still ARMv6. It would be nice to have ARMv7 which is where all of the high performance stuff is.

Edit. I take that back, it will be ARMv7 arch. Other articles state that the new Broadcom SOC will be using A7s. That makes it huge for this price point.

Still no GbE which is a massive disappointment for me.

Install resin.io on it and smile :) I could even use them for light-weight app server :)

Will it run some version of flash? (and yes I tried gnash to no avail).

I spent the weekend explaining to an 8 and 6 y/o that they can't share and look at other Scratch projects at scratch.mit.edu on the RPi :(

Not sure if this might help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8982251

Probably a performance hit - but with the js performance arms race - maybe not!

That's Scratch 1.4—normal Raspbian comes with it built-in, actually—the trouble is Scratch 2.0, which is fully flash-based.

Wow. That was an unusual technology choice to make in 2013.

Am I weird for wanting to use this for really simple web hosting?

Nope. The Pi makes a lot of sense for a simple web server with a robust SQL/NOSQL database backend running with Node/Go. If you have a good internet connection with a good upload speed, you can easily run a server able to take a couple of hundred hits a minute. It is certainly a better option than using the cloud for prototyping, where a wrong for loop can instantiate loads of instances and bill you a hell lot.

The Pi does not make sense for any level of consumer-targeted production (dev, stage or live) beyond "oh hey, it works." "A couple of hundred hits a minute" is also not impressive in the least, even for something of the Pi's stature.

I also don't think the stack would matter all that much at this point - IO blocking would be happening at the application level, not the architectural. Node, Go, Ruby, Python, PHP ... it really wouldn't matter. SQL versus NoSQL is also a non-issue in this case.

I also wouldn't take something very underpowered instead of the cloud just because I hadn't configured my cloud host to keep things within reason (ie no autoscaling at all, which is what you'd expect for hobby-level prototyping.

tldr; don't eschew better options for the Pi unless you don't understand how your cloud host works.

I agree it makes no sense for consumer-targeted production. I have played with the pi and run a small robot to collect intermittent data from twitter and store it on Mongo, which I can remotely access using the web service. At the same time, I would not want to go all the way to the cloud for such a small thing. I guess it depends on the use-case.

OTOH you could front a pi-based server with Pagekite (pagekite.net) and get the best of both worlds.

Do you think your ISP will let your host a webserver without asking them first?

IMO the pogoplug is really simple to reload with Arch Linux and it's super cheap. However, it's worth noting that it's really lacking in horsepower when compared with the Pi and other contemporary offerings. But for ~15 USD shipped, it's astonishingly affordable.

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5/pogoplug-series-4

Not particularly - there are several datacenters that offer raspberry pi servers as a commercial offering.

I can't remember the name of the one near me (had a slick photo of black and green pi cases on their dc floor), but a little googling found this one: http://raspberrycolocation.com/

hosting pis without needing/being able to access gpio and such is a silly marketing fad. it must be so ineffective in term of space and heat that i would be surprised that they have a single beefy server running several pis in emulation for the clients.

A fad it may be, but I can attest to them having actual Raspberry Pi devices in colo or at least spending a lot of effort to make it seem like they've put mine in colo (more effort than would be required to just plug in the silly thing). I had a spare Pi sitting around so I loaded it up with a decent SD card, a USB stick, and a barebones Raspbian config and sent it off. It now functions as a backup MX, secondary DNS, a VPN endpoint, and a remote monitor of sorts.

It doesn't have to be powerful because I'm the only one using it. Since it costs me EUR0/month, why not? Isn't that what hobbyist tinkering is about?

ah. you can send your device with all the things attached that you want?

Sometimes people do things for fun rather than economic maximisation.

What server software would you ideally run on the PI 2? Would it be reasonable to have it use a home internet connection?

Node.js is probably already included. I'm running that on my BeagleBone Black.

ARM11/(ARMv6)? I thought that core was a dead-end that was quickly replaced by the Cortex-A (ARMv7) series. Surprised to see ARMv6 in new hardware in this age...

You sure will, for a higher price.

The RPi2 uses an ARMv7 Cortex A7 processor, not an ARMv6.

Thanks, I see the article has been updated (it stated ARM11 this morning), but too late to edit my comment.

While a bit more expensive, I purchased a Hummingboard [1] instead of a Pi, and the performance was great! I had a NodeJS/Postgresql app running on it for kicks. I was surprised at how quick it was.

[1] http://www.solid-run.com/products/hummingboard/linux-sbc-spe...

the entry level model is 70 bucks. Its a bit more than a bit more expensive.

> While a bit more expensive

Actually at least twice as expensive (starts at $70 compared to the RPi's $35).

And with the new RPi announced here, it's basically twice the price for quarter/half the CPU power of the Pi (single/dual core vs 4 core RPi).

This update is very welcome and for sure it will make people create more interesting "projects". Personally i'm very excited to get one of these to run owncloud at decent performance in my home. Also the possibility to install more Linux distributions or even Windows 10 will open much possibilities for development. Well Done!!

I really want 2gb. I'm surprised there isn't a market of Pi-like devices, with compatible software, but higher price points and higher specs.

These could interest you: Odroid-C1[1] with 1GB RAM for $35 or U3[2] with 2GB for $69

[1]http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code... [2]http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code...

Anyone know where this can be purchased now?

From the usual Pi manufacturing partners, e.g.:

http://www.element14.com/community/community/raspberry-pi/ra...

EDIT: apologies, it looks like this link in fact contains the "old" B+ not the one discussed here, my bad.

Could not find it at the standard resellers yet… maybe on Monday (Feb 2) morning?

http://www.element14.com/community/community/raspberry-pi

http://www.alliedelec.com/search/results.aspx?term=raspberry

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=raspberry...

Adafruit has it in their shop: https://www.adafruit.com/products/2358

Why would it cost $44.95?

The Register article specifically says "the Pi 2 will sell at the same price as the B+ – $35 – but the latter will live on"

Looks like the E14 sales link for the new one is now live,

http://www.element14.com/community/view-product.jspa?fsku=24...

Excited to see how well this will help my distro PiPlay (and PetRock's RetroPie).

Can't wait to get my hands on the hardware

-Shea

Remove the ethernet port. Remove the double stacked usb ports. Use single rows of micro USB or Lightning, 4 on one side. Make it flatter, simpler, more beautiful. Encase it in alluminum. Steve Jobs would do it and push it through our throats. And we would love it.

Or at least make it a premium choice, and make extra money from those who love beauty.

I don't agree with encasing it for a couple of reasons. 1) The goal is to get maximum functionality out of minimal cost. If you want to encase it you can buy a case yourself. 2) Not including a case has encouraged the community to get creative and sell cases, or patterns to 3D print one. Inspiring creativity is another goal of the foundation.

I wouldn't mind if it was a little smaller, but again, they want to keep the cost down.

How is the wayland/weston support going? This thing should be quite capable now.

Maybe the Kano will be able to perform worth a damn, now (post-upgrade).

It still requires proprietary firmware to function at all. No thanks. Please fix this serious flaw!

Edit: And to make things worse, they are giving away gratis Windows 10 licenses for it!

This is actually a great boon. The Windows development environment is incredibly inviting to beginners and it has a lot of power. Linux may be more flexible and open, but it's really hard to get started with when you have no experience programming.

Microsoft says "you are not allowed to learn about our software". Besides being an inferior programming environment, it is also an anti-educational one.

Need gigabit!

Just curious, (if you can share) what are you doing on your RPi that saturates the 100Mb?

I would also be curious if you are able to reach 100Mb with your pi

I run mine as a NAS, and the performance is pretty terrible. The portability is great though! I'm somewhat nomadic at the moment so it's great to have a 1TB NAS that I can pack in my laptop bag (1TB external 2.5" drive + rpi: minimal weight too)

How do I purchase this in the US?

Element14 should have it

Why didn't they just skip to Cortex A53? It would've been worth waiting a year longer for that.

The headline gave me hope. Alas no button on the front for overclocking. I am wistfully disappointed.

Really? Build a button yourself to overlock! The Pi is about giving you the tools, now, go forth and build.

First I want to revel in inch thick Computer Shopper whist.

Jokes aside, I'm curious as to whether this can be overclocked to any extent, like its predecessor.

Yes, according to this post: http://haydenjames.io/raspberry-pi-2-overclock/

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