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News Raspberry Pi Compute Module announced

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 8 Apr 2014.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  2. Saivert

    Saivert Minimodder

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    A shame. One reason my interest in the Pi faded was because of the wrong SoC they picked. The big performance gap between the GPU and CPU is unacceptable and makes it only really suitable for what the foundation originally intended: Teaching kids to code and watch high def video.

    Other hardware projects are better for the tinkerer. Arduino Mega, Beaglebone, etc. Yes they cost more but they give you over twice times as much power where it matters for embedded projects.
     
  3. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    When Clive Sinclair sent protoge Chris Curry off to head up Science of Cambridge, he told him to help himself to old components from Sinclair Radionics' warehouse. (At the time, Uncle Clive was doing his best to convince the National Enterprise Board to forgo its share in Sinclair Radionics by closing down the company, so a little stock shrinkage was of no importance.) Curry did exactly that, grabbing a box or two of an outdated chip originally used to drive Uncle Clive's calculators before the Japanese and the Chinese muscled their way in with far cheaper offerings. Those chips were used to build the Mk.14, a low-cost microprocessing system for the hobbyist. It was basically a calculator with pretensions, but sales were strong; so strong, in fact, that after Curry left to found Acorn Uncle Clive decided to follow it up with the £99 ZX80 - the world's first truly affordable home computer. The rest, as they say, is history.

    Why did I tell you all that? 'Cos that's basically the origin story of the Pi. A Broadcom engineer had a brainwave one day, asked his bosses if they had any real need for the outdated BCM2835s they had cluttering up the warehouse, the bosses said "if you can find a use for 'em, have 'em." The Pi was born, and proved so successful that Broadcom began manufacturing more BCM2835s to meet demand - long after their original market, low-end set-top box manufacturers, had moved on to bigger and better things.
    This. The Pi has cost on its side, but that lead is being eaten away: the BeagleBone Black isn't much more expensive, and offers far more power and flexibility; then there's the Olimex OLinuXino family which is significantly more powerful and with a fully open hardware design - unlike the locked-down and proprietary Pi.
     

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