It has a fast GPU, but an extremely slow CPU. It’s actually designed to be a video decoding chip, and Broadcom just threw a low-powered support CPU onto the chip because it’d allow device makers to use it without having to put in a CPU for situations where the CPU doesn’t do much…
I’m convinced that most people bought these things because they saw them on a bunch of blogs, got caught up in the hype, and decided to pick one up because it was cheap. When they arrive in the mail, they will go “hey, that’s neat”, play with it for a period of between 5 and 45 minutes, then put it in a drawer forever.
You’re probably not wrong. Still, it’s cheap, and it’s not impossible to imagine it having some legitimate niche uses – get FCEUX working on it and it’s a great NES emulator, for instance.
Ironically, I ordered it because I was feeling nostalgic for Linux and wanted a Linux box to screw around with – but between then and now, I moved to Linux on my main laptop, so have all the screwing around bases covered.
I will say, though, there’s still something fun about the minimalist Linux on the RPi. Yes, it’s nifty (and practical) how slick Ubuntu is, and how it boots up instantly to its clean and elegant graphical login screen – but there’s also something cool about watching all the boot messages scroll by as the RPi boots up before it presents you with a plain text login prompt.
I gotta say, that’s nifty. Too bad they’re all out of stock.
Got hold of an SD card. Here are some pics of the device plugged in and in the middle of an XBMC install (Raspbmc). Excuse the crappy phone quality.
I will happily admit I am not expecting good performance, I am well aware the design goals do not align with a cheap HTPC solution. But those design goals themselves are very admirable and that they have pulled it off is no small feat.
It is sitting on top of a rooted, XBMC’d ATV2, btw. This unit acts as a secondary HTPC in my kitchen reasonably admirably. Apparently ATV2’s are fetching quite the price on Ebay since the ATV3 was released. One of my friends recently admitted to paying AUD$200+ for one…
New, cheaper slimmed down Pi coming. Able to be run off a battery or solar power. I’m eagerly waiting to see what kind of crazy things people will come up with by enabling this to go mobile.
I finally picked one up (model B 512mb):
''We’re closing in on 1.5 million [sales] for something that we thought would sell a thousand…"
That is a great result for them. Are they ending up in schools etc, i’ve not noticed at my end but maybe i should check it out. We seriously need a new generation of not exclusively game consumers, but game creators, and these kind of devices in schools could really help with all that.
Raspberry pi 2 is out now:
arm 7, quad core, 1 gb ram, 6x faster.
Microsoft will offer a free version of Windows 10 for use on the Raspberry Pi 2:
Windows is largely useless as it’s not intel.
The rpi2 is much faster now. But the rpi1 was fast enough for Kodi (with GPU-offloading). With competitors like the firetv stick and various chinese android sticks, it’s unclear why you would choose a rpi2 for a media box.
I’m still mystified by its popularity. It’s well-suited to “internet of things” hacking projects, but I can’t imagine that’s a mass market.
They’re used in education. They’re used in industry.
It’s had a ton of software and USB drivers ported to it…I know someone who uses them to control CCTV, for instance. He needs one per four cameras, but they’re £25 and the specialised hardware he used to use is like £80/camera. (The recording is done on a dedicated box, still, because it’s a special tamper-proof thing)
Sure, but they sell way too many of them to be limited to education and industrial uses. End-users are buying these things in droves.
Nitpick, but it’s using a cortex-a7 (v7a variant of the armv7 ISA), which is a very different thing than arm7 (armv3 ISA). Yes, ARM’s naming is really, really terrible. Wikipedia has a magic decoder ring at ARM architecture family - Wikipedia.
Yes, I was tripped up by the same thing, thinking it was like the ancient iphone3GS SoC. But it’s actually the low-power variant of the A15. Not current, but not far off either.
4 million? It’s not actually THAT many, you know.
Ironically the UK is still the best per capita market for them…schools and Universities basically use them as THE cheap hardware for working on robotics, automatic, etc.
…I really can’t over-emphasise how important it is that there’s a shit-ton of USB device drivers for it.
It’s also the version of Kodi with the most installs. Kodi has been fully optimized for the rpi and actually runs pretty well on that really quite ancient SoC. But at $35 for the rpi and a couple bucks for a case and sdcard, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense versus a firetv stick or chinese android stick these days.
Historical stuff aside, you’re right, the cortex-a7 is a pretty capable processor and is great for this sort of the application. Should be a lot of fun to play with. For non-hacker use-cases, though, I’m not sure where the market attraction comes from, either. A firetv stick isn’t quite as capable on the CPU side (dual core cortex-a9), but that’s plenty of oomph for what it’s doing.
Yeah, but the firetv stick comes with storage, a bluetooth remote, and remote-capable netflix/hulu+/amazon apps. For media box purposes, not even close.