News Raspberry Pi 2 launches with quad-core ARMv7 chip

Holly sh!t yeah ! I'm glad I've waited a little.

 

It is a great way to get into programming and im glad that Microsoft and Apple are having their share slowly but surely eaten away by Linux. This added competition through the development of new programming talent is exactly what is needed to push innovation and to hopefully drive costs down whilst expanding compatibility. Its not like there isn't enough money in Microsoft of Apple to be able to do this..

 

Build a cheap cluster from them and learn distributed computing.

 

Or how much a waste of time the Surface RT was.

 

Microsoft are trying to keep themselves relevant; the last thing they want is for a new generation of engineers to bring their Linux experience to the enterprise market. It's a bit desperate, but perfectly understandable. As for not giving Surface/SurfaceRT tablets an upgrade when they'll do it for the Raspberry Pi 2: lol. marketing.

Microsoft aside, my flabber was indeed gasted when I first heard about this. I've got one on the way from RS already (along with an A+ so that I can hopefully kick off a project that's been on the back-burner for so long that it burnt to a crisp years ago).

Some may reckon that this is a long overdue upgrade, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation isn't quite as small a project as it once was. Back when the original Pi launched Broadcom were basically doing them a massive favour by giving them access to the BCM2835 in such low quantities - companies like Broadcom don't tend to give you the time of day unless you're committing to an order of several tens of thousands of units. Now however they're able to negotiate with Broadcom as a fairly major customer. There couldn't have been a much more powerful Pi 2 if it wasn't for the massive success of the Pi.

Really looking forward to putting this board through its paces.

 

I have slowly been gathering parts to do this but I haven't started buying the pi's so I'm chuffed to bits at the release. Now I'll have a 16-20 core cluster across 4-5 nodes, instead of just 4-5 cores. No extra cost either.

 

True enough, but the fact that Eben (and others) also worked for Broadcom was probably the leverage they needed in order to get access to that unused stockpile. Especially considering they weren't even sure whether they were going to sell even 10,000 units to start with. It's hard to imagine Broadcom giving A. N. Other access to that backlog of unsold components when the maximum number of units that they might possibly sell is only 10,000.

 

....In which case the fact that Eben works for Broadcom gave them an advantage that no one else would have had. So my point still (sort of) stands - we just quibble over semantics

 

That's when he's in the office. It's only taken me 4 weeks to replace his Blackberry and get the darn thing back - Nice guy tho.

Most of the Rasp chip design is now done is Bristol rather than Cambridge although a few of the team are still here including the FGPA guys for the team.

 

I think the problem is MS sells Windows RT as Windows, yet it doesn't work with [traditional/x86] Windows software even though it looks, acts, and is called "Windows". So people bought it thinking they could install their normal programs and games only to find it won't run. However, RT isn't going to get anywhere until they get enough people willing to develop for it. Due to the immense popularity of the Pi, this is a great opportunity for MS to get a huge userbase to help refine RT and make it a worth-while OS. I still think people will choose linux though, since it will perform better, have more apps, and will have better support.


Anyway, I see this product as a response to the ODROID-C1. That's a pretty tough competitor.

 

Somewhat related - Gareth, did you get to play with the free [to devs] 'Internet of Things' version of Windows they released for the Intel Galileo?

 

Not bad, still needs proper Ethernet or USB3, or ,at least, dedicated USB2 line for it.

 

http://blog.broadcom.com/raspberry-...ands-on-a-raspberry-pi-2-hat-tip-to-broadcom/

 

The Pi was always intended to be a cheap but functional widget for kids to learn to code on... The fact geeky types who love to thinker with something jumped on it and bought boatloads of them is more of a nice side-effect for them... Adding Faster Ethernet, USB3 and/or other feature creep to please the geeky types would [imo unecessarily] bump the price up and stop it being the cheap kiddie-code widget it was intended to be.

That's a shame, I imagined the 'free' pi version being somewhat similar to the version they had for the Galileo but not having seen/used the cut-sown Galileo version I wasn't sure what windows features it had [or didn't have]...