Still 100MBit Ethernet
The rest of the spec looks promising. I may get myself one as a "birthday present" to see if it can finally be usable as a desktop
As rumoured last week, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is celebrating its fourth birthday today with the release of the Pi 3, packing a 1.2 GHz 64-bit ARM Cortex A53, 802.11n Wireless LAN capability and Bluetooth 4.1. The Raspberry Pi 3 The Raspberry Pi 3 We spoke to Pi head honcho Eben Upton last week ahead of the unleashing …
That BPI-M3 certainly looks nice. But I do notice the SATA is just a USB-SATA adapter hung off a USB hub on board, so not necessarily any better than a USB HDD plugged into a Pi. (Though you do have the option of not sharing that USB2 line with anything else and still having another port available, unlike the Pi).
8 cores, 2GiB ram and 8GiB eMMC are very nice, though.
However, until I see decent PowerVR 3D drivers in OSS, I won't be there.
1gb of ram isn't enough. i used till last year an ancient netbook with 1gb as my main system. web browsers need more. 2gb would be better but i suspect 3gb would be needed before it stops hammering virtual memory. you can use lite browsers. midori, qupzilla, but those have sites they won't work properly on or just crash when loading.
i'll still buy one when i can find a shop in dublin selling them. the added bt and wifi is most welcome as it frees up usb ports and reduces space it needs without those been occupied.
i used till last year an ancient netbook with 1gb as my main system. web browsers need more
An Intel-based netbook running (presumably) some variant of Windows and Internet Explorer is a completely different beast to an ARM-based Pi running a reasonably optimised Linux (Debian - Raspbian) with a lightweight desktop (LXDE) and an efficient web browser.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, a Pi 1 with single-core processor and 512MB RAM was useable for many desktop tasks, and until I upgraded them to a Pi 2 my boys did most of their schoolwork on one. The Pi 2 is so much more usable with its quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM that nowadays they only use the "family" Mac Mini if a: they both need to use the computer at the same time or b: they need to access a website which uses Flash.
Albeit the Mac Mini is an old 32-bit Core Duo model, it often feels like treacle compared to the Pi 2.
I am 75% sure than when we finally have to retire the Mini I'll install a Pi 3 or two instead (maybe there'll be a slightly enhanced next model). The family is already storing most files on the file server rather than locally.
Yes, I do have another computer which is a bit more beefy for those things neither the Pi nor the Mac can handle such as video editing ;-)
M.
the netbook was running xubuntu, also tried lubuntu but stayed ultimately on xubuntu in the end.
browsers eat memory. their biggest weakness. run a browser for 3-4 weeks on a system that is up 24x7 and see how that memory lasts. on the netbook i needed to restart the browser to free memory 4+ times a day as it started to slow down. using midori sorted that mostly but for wacky reasons theregister site makes it crash hard. the new 64bit arm would probably be beefier than the ancient atom but i don't see it solving the memory problem with the browsers.
don't get me wrong, i'll be buying one but if there was one feature i wanted to see upgraded it was memory more than anything else. with 2gb i could easily see me replacing current wonky laptop at home as main system.
browsers eat memory. their biggest weakness. run a browser for 3-4 weeks on a system that is up 24x7 and see how that memory lasts
I'm not denying that, but honestly, how hard is it to restart every now and then on a desktop machine? Keep it on all day, switch off at bedtime - perform updates as necessary - switch it on again in the morning. The Pi 1 could handle half a dozen tabs open on sites like BBC news, Hornby, a1steam, The Register, duckduckgo and still be (just about) usable. The Pi 2 has no problem at all.
Horses for courses, if you need to have 37 tabs open on multiple graphics- and script-heavy websites, a Pi is not the computer you need. Neither is an Atom-based notebook to be honest (I have an EeePC 901 with 2GB RAM) but crumbs, for £30 I can put up with a little bit of being sensible!
It's a flippin' long way up from saving files to cassette tape and AMX Pagemaker (later Stop Press) having to "page" strips of an A4 page to floppy disc every time you scrolled.
<insert usual "kids these days" gripe >
<grin>
M.
Anecdotal evidence, possibly not relevant to Linux, please feel free to correct me:
Using some old Windows XP desktops with around 1GB of RAM, I found Chrome too memeory hungry, so I installed Opera. My reasoning at the time was that each Chrome tab was a sandboxed instance, so using resources. Whether I was right or wrong, Opera worked better than Chrome on these underpowered machines.
A Pi2 can handle TheRegister, internet shopping, and the enormous attack surface required for internet banking. I am sure there are sites that will bring it to its knees, but a do not visit sites that try to mine bitcoins with javascript. Openoffice did the minimal tasks I require of it (convert docx and xls to odt and csv). Cropping and scaling a 6Mpixel image to 1920x1080 with the gimp required patience.
1gb of ram isn't enough.<p>your problem is that you are using Firefuscked and probably KDE... stick to using the default browser on RPi and LXDE or XFCE or enlightenment or blackbox as the desktop and you're well in...<p>Personally, I'd love to see KDE 2 or Gnome 2 running on this... I had a 900 MHz laptop with only 256MB of ram back in 2002 and it was fine running those..
Beyond the NIC still running connected via USB, the other major limitation is storage. The Pi 2 was a dramatic improvement over the first gen iterations, but even the Pi 3 will suffer the same, very low IOPS performance that will render the unit unusable for many people.
So long as one as proper expectations, the Pi 3 will be more capable than the Pi 2. For me, I tried to stand a couple up as DHCP/DNS servers at home and they failed miserably. The storage performance just wasn't good enough, even moving the rootfs to a USB flash drive.
Bad at DNS and DHCP?
Ive used a Pi B+ as a stand in DNS box (BIND) for whilst I was performing maintenance. The DNS server it stood in for was authoritative for 150+ domains and countless subdomains. It handled it with ease.
Mind you, I changed the defsult memory split and applied a moderate overclock.
Oh and its also worth spending a few quid extra on a Class 10 or better SD card.
I think the Jesus Phone beats that hands down, depending on the definition of a "computer", CPU, GPU, RAM, ROM, keyboard, programmable (even inside a walled garden), peripheral expansion and the additional advantage of a screen and a modem. Seems to check a lot of boxes for a "computer".
debateable, but to me programmable means i can use itself to program it. the ios platform needs a real computer to write the programs. a real omission to my mind as it is powerful enough to have some level of programming built in.
but then i was spoiled by having a psion organiser in 90s which allowed me to write apps in opl on the device.
but then i was spoiled by having a psion organiser in 90s which allowed me to write apps in opl on the device.
Very much so. And I loved how long Psion 3a lasted on its batteries. I did prefer the 5mx that I upgraded to. The keyboard was so much better.
debateable, but to me programmable means i can use itself to program it. the ios platform needs a real computer to write the programs. a real omission to my mind as it is powerful enough to have some level of programming built in.
Pythonista is excellent, if you're on an iPad of any variety.
I'm afraid to say that I've bought all the Bs so far, including both versions of the original logic board. I think I might be a bit of a Pi fan boy. They're all used too - some of them as loaner units for my friends. Will I be buying the 64 bit version? Hell yeah! I only wish that decent cases like the Plusberry were easier to come by.
A board that connects to networking via USB (on-board) isn't exactly router material. For that purpose you're better off with one of the OpenWrt-running boards (about 15Eur at Olimex IIRC) which are built with... surprise... using the chips that normally go into routers. Or, you know, just buy a router that can run OpenWrt to get something that comes in a box directly...
I think if you can get it to interface with an Arduino, then you can get a really good system to run as a robot controller with the Pi doing the processing and the Ardruino interfacing with sensors.
By the way, what is the speed of the latest Raspberry Pi like? Is it like a Celery or an Atom or faster?
"I think the Jesus Phone beats that hands down"
There has been 12 different major models so far - and with the different storage configurations that's how many models, 30 or so? Which one has been the highest selling model and how many millions have been sold? I'm genuinely curious.
RPI has now had 6 different models, with altogether 8 million units sold.
Commodore 64 had two models, but I don't know how many C-64c models were sold. C64c was really the same model with a redesigned chassis, but how many of each model was sold, I can't say.