Raspberry Pi 3B+ Launches With Faster CPU, Dual-Band 802.11ac, Faster Ethernet

[hajj_3]

Still 700 Mbps short of a Gigabit, but I guess it's an improvement.

The biggest disappointments are:

• Only USB 2.0 (WTF?)
• Storage is still accessed via USB 2.0 (again, WTF?)
• GPU is still VideoCore IV (no OpenCL; only OpenGL ES 2.0; generally quite old & weak)

The old gpu is what is stopping usb3 from being used and for more than 1gb ddr2 from being used. If Broadcom hurry up with the new VC5 gpu then Broadcom will be able to make a modern chip for the raspberry pi that has usb3, ddr4 memory with a higher quantity, full gigabit Ethernet and not sharing bandwidth for usb and Ethernet. They could also get an updated video block for 4k h265 and 4k vp9 video. They might even switch to Cortex A55 cores by the time the VC5 gpu is ready.

[starshipeleven]

How in the what?

The SoC lacks an integrated ethernet controller, there is also a single usb 2.0 controller, so all the USB ports AND the ethernet controller are all behind a USB hub.

This is all soldered and integrated in the board.

[Guest]

Same crappy GPU? Not interested.

[kaprikawn]

lol at people moaning about the specs on a $35 soc board.

I've been thinking of getting another RPi, my only Pi3 went in a joystick thing (that I never use). Glad I held off.

[Michael_S]

People in here are missing the point, I think. RPI wants to go as low cost as possible. If you're searching for a 64bit ARM computer, rpi-style, there's always Odroid. Their C2 has a far superior video system, and their XU4 has USB 3.0. Both get GbE saturated, and are way faster. Around 50-60$, though, so you pay for what you get :-)

I was going to make this point too - the reason the Raspberry Pi 3B+ still sucks is that it's $35. That's probably an ideal price position, just low enough that people buy them just out of curiosity and for pet projects. They sell many millions of them.

I have to admit, I have two older Raspberry Pis collecting dust right now. I never bought an Odroid or equivalent.

[FireBurn]

I look forward to the RPi4, hopefully with VC5 and a decent amount of RAM

The Pi's have always been underpowered but the work done on opening the stack has been amazing

[WolfpackN64]

People in here are missing the point, I think. RPI wants to go as low cost as possible. If you're searching for a 64bit ARM computer, rpi-style, there's always Odroid. Their C2 has a far superior video system, and their XU4 has USB 3.0. Both get GbE saturated, and are way faster. Around 50-60$, though, so you pay for what you get :-)

And their video drivers are proprietary.

[macemoneta]

The RPi series are primarily focused on education. As such it's the first SBC that most people are exposed to, and even though it's technically not very good, it's familiar. There are hundreds of SBC, many less expensive, that have much more functionality: SATA, full gigabit Ethernet with a separate PHY, more RAM, out-of-the-boc Linux distribution compatibility, Few people seem to venture far from RPi though. It's the comfort food of SBC.

[Jabberwocky]

lol at people moaning about the specs on a $35 soc board.

They have sold over 14 000 000 raspberry pi units, as Liam Tung from znet.com reports. I think people are not unreasonable.

PS: I would not mind a fully open source risc-v board, similar to the raspberry pi. I don't mind paying more though. Has anyone tried https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ ?

[starshipeleven]

lol at people moaning about the specs on a $35 soc board.

Imho the only thing worth moaning about is the ethernet shared with USB ports.
If it had a single USB port and a single (dedicated) 100MBit ethernet it would be so much better.