Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 78 posts

Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#1
In the consumer and the small business markets, we are having computing power being more and more shifted from desktops or laptops to tablets and smartphones, we are even seeing full computing watches these days. In your opinion, what about DIY, IoT, small robotics, etc. and the generalist barebone computers they use, like Arduino, Raspberry, etc.? Will they become more and more powerful for a new race to bigger, maybe embedded systems or will they stay small, open, very cheap and marginally energy-hungry?

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#4
From the interviews I've heard with the founder, rPi set a price point first, then developed the best hackable computer they could to match it. If they keep up with that (as they have so far) then expect something more powerful and possibly smaller at the same price. Although I think the rPi zero is probably at the lower end of how small you can go without making tinkering cumbersome with all those gpio pins and such. although, people also like ATTiny, so who knows :)

Re: Ask HN: How will it go for Raspberry Pi in the coming years?

#9
Their competitor, Libre Computer, has mused that given their investment in the graphics stack, they might be headed in the GPGPU / AI direction. Think Raspberry Pis that you can cluster together for deep learning, or individual boards that kids can tinker with to learn about AI. The blog post also predicted the 3B+ fairly exactly:

https://libre.computer/2017/12/06/raspberry-pi-3x-raspberry-...

Money quote:

> We expect the Raspberry Pi 4 to be based on a new Broadcom SoC based on Cortex-A55 built on < 28nm fabrication process. We can call this BCM2839 and it will feature the much alluded to VC5 GPU and a new form factor. Since that hardware is more than two years away, it is difficult to predict the direction of the industry and thus the exact specifications. We expect such a Raspberry Pi 4 board to utilize dual 32-bit LPDDR3 or LPDDR4 to cope with the bandwidth requirements of OpenCL and neural network acceleration. The exact release date for such a specimen can vary dramatically depending on Broadcom’s tapeout schedule. It should be relatively soon if the Raspberry Pi Foundation expects to release hardware in 2019.

Post reply on HN