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Turbocharged Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Turbocharged Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed

#73

Post by Sophistifunk »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
greyfade wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 withou…

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 la…

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.

Re: Turbocharged Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed

#74

Post by jwcooper »

tbrock wrote: post #72

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.

Re: Turbocharged Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed

#75

Post by throwaway000002 »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #64
aswanson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-bi…

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

Re: Turbocharged Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed

#80

Post by 20kleagues »

nkozyra wrote: post #52
20kleagues wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.
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