You’d be surprised by how much power and speed you do, in fact, need for modern computing. Here’s a video of a web browser running on it. That web browser is Midori (designed to be lightweight), and the X desktop is LXDE (designed to be lightweight), and it is painfully slow.
Remember, this is a processor that is slower than an iPhone 3GS, closer to the iPhone 1 in many ways; it’s not even in Atom’s league. The fancy demos they’ve shown of 1080p video and 3D rendering obscure this, because the GPU is legitimately modern, but the processor is very low-end. It’s an ARM11 design, the same architecture as the processor in the iPhone 1 and Kindle 2, and is less powerful than the iPhone 3GS and Kindle 4. Any tablet or modern smartphone is vastly, vastly more powerful. A netbook is practically a supercomputer in comparison.
The goal of the Raspberry Pi is to enable students to learn programming. That thing will do just fine for firing up xterms, Emacs, and Python. As a computer for productivity purposes… well, there’s a reason nobody’s producing $35 computers for that purpose.
Yeah, that’s a purpose for which it’s legitimately well-suited. The Roku 2 boxes use the same SoC – streaming video (unlike general purpose computing) is one of its explicit design goals.
Bear in mind this thing is being sold as a naked circuit board so basically any application is going to require some engineering on the end user’s part…
It’s a naked circuit board, but all you need to do to make it fully functional is slide in an SD card and plug in an HDMI monitor, USB keyboard/mouse, Ethernet, and micro USB power. It might look inelegant sitting out there nekkid, but it’s fully functional all by itself.
If you only view content the GPU can accelerate, sure. I doubt it can handle SD divx media in software. And of course you’ll need to add an IR receiver, which costs as much as the “computer” itself. And a case to hold the thing.
People are really excited about this, because it sounds crazy cool, but fairly soon they’ll realize they have no use for it. The appletv jailbroken with XBMC, Roku2, or the boxee box are much better set top boxes. It’s way too slow to do real office-type work. It’s just a toy.
Now don’t get me wrong, I can imagine some cool uses for stuff like this with faster SoCs inside. A raspberry pi type device with that new qualcomm krait SoC could be interesting, and future generations will continue in that same vein.
It’s got the same SoC as that Roku box, so they’ll play the same types of video. I personally would have more use for a cheap XBMC machine (even if it couldn’t play every type of file, which I really don’t know about – I don’t think there’s any reason it couldn’t use the GPU to accelerate Divx) than for another Netflix streamer. And a Boxee might be better, but it also costs $180 instead of $35, which isn’t nothing.
It’s just a toy.
So are Arduino and the Beagle Board, except that they cost a lot more. Even as a pure toy, the thing’s a deal.
Currently I lug an old laptop around to do university presentations with, this could easily replace it. (While being cheap enough losing it is “eh”. Oh, and it’s MORE powerful than the laptop I’m currently using, so… :P).
I could actually see some Arduino type uses cropping up for this thing. From memory it has serial pin-outs on the board, so could feasibly control any number of devices, no?
So I got a Raspberry Pi in the mail. Set it up with Debian, and… it’s a little Linux box, sure enough. There’s something primally cool about taking a little circuit board, putting in an SD card loaded with Debian, plugging in a keyboard, Ethernet, HDMI out to the receiver, and then finally plugging it into my phone charger to power it, and having an old-school Linux machine boot up a text-mode login prompt on my TV.
Actually, the disturbing thought I had was when I was SSHing into it, and I realized that, underpowered as it is, the RPi is almost certainly significantly more powerful than the fancy SPARC workstations in the CS labs that I used to telnet into to do my CS homework, back in the day.
I got mine a few days ago as well. Think I was lucky, placed an order on the distributor in the first few hours after the release announcement, on the /au version of the actual product page, but before all their front page announcements pages went live. There was probably enough orders in the first 24 hours that the initial batch was well and truly sold out.
Have not had a chance to play with it yet, had no SD card lying around. Maybe tonight if the local storm has not knocked out my power. Keen to see if XBMC on this platform outperforms XBMC on AppleTV2.
It won’t. It is much, much, much slower than the AppleTV2, which has an A4 (Cortex A9) processor; Raspberry Pi has an ARM11 processor, which is multiple generations slower than that.
