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

[starshipeleven]

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.

most of the sales of Raspi is because it lets people do things that an Arduino costing as much as twice or more would very much struggle with, while it is far easier to program (and accepts far more languages and so on). But it's still usually doing something very "dumb", very "microcontroller-like".

That's what a Raspi was designed to do, and why it's kinda crappy by PC or even embedded device standards. Because it is competing with microcontrollers.

It's people trying to use it as media center or PC that puzzle me. There it is indeed a piece of shit that isn't worth the price you pay for.

[starshipeleven]

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.

I'd like to disagree on "out-of-the-boc Linux distribution compatibility". Afaik they just provide pre-made images with blobs, kinda.

[willmore]

starshipeleven They're being dropped by distros because their hardware is so out of date. Do they run a mainline kernel, yet?

[sykobee]

For the price, and for the ecosystem, it's a good product.

But yes, the single USB2 port is a big issue, but it needs a new SoC to fix that. Hopefully the follow-up to the current SoC will have a USB3 and a USB2 port, and on-board GigE or WiFi, alongside a quad A55, on 28nm (existing SoC is 40nm). VC5 graphics will be nice too.

[L_A_G]

I've never really understood the enormous hate some people have for the Pi... It's obviously supposed to be low cost and low power, but also at the same time offer a huge array of possibilities and an easy entry point for people wanting to get into embedded systems. The inevitable end result of this is the jack-of-all-ace-of-none solution that the RPi is (thou some would probably downgrade it further from a jack to a four of clubs or something).

Mind you, I say this as someone who considered the RPi for a display/storage system, but decided to go with an ODroid-XU4 instead due to the lack of fast ethernet or IO to local storage (i.e USB3.0 or SATA that isn't trough a USB2.0 controller). Most of the RPi's use is admittedly in hobby and educational projects, but you occasionally do see it put to good use in more professional environments. Something I found out pretty quickly when evaluating alternatives to the RPi was that the communities around all the competing boards and families of them, including the ODroid, are nowhere near the size of the community around the RPi and that's a genuinely valuable feather in it's hat.

[kaprikawn]

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/ ?

The amount of units sold does not affect the cost of the BOM

[oskar-n]

Something I found out pretty quickly when evaluating alternatives to the RPi was that the communities around all the competing boards and families of them, including the ODroid, are nowhere near the size of the community around the RPi and that's a genuinely valuable feather in it's hat.

Yeah, the community is the biggest strength of using a RPi, it's sort of a de facto standard.
There are too many competing platforms that fragments the market, so they have a hard time to gain traction.

[chuckula]

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)

IMO, the clock speed wasn't its main weakness, and the boost still isn't enough for it to surpass rivals like the ODROID-C2, which is better on all fronts.

This is the exact same SoC as the older Raspberry Pi models, just with a few tweaks and the 80211AC wireless adapter. That means you won't be getting any of those improvements until Broadcom, which is the unofficial "backer" of Raspberry Pi since most of the designers worked for Broadcom, finally comes out with an improved chip.

Listening to the founders talk about a potential future hardware upgrade is hilarious because they talk like SoCs made on 28nm processes are these exotic and futuristic parts that may never show up because OMG Moore's Law is dying or something.

[M@yeulC]

most of the sales of Raspi is because it lets people do things that an Arduino costing as much as twice or more would very much struggle with, while it is far easier to program (and accepts far more languages and so on). But it's still usually doing something very "dumb", very "microcontroller-like".

That's what a Raspi was designed to do, and why it's kinda crappy by PC or even embedded device standards. Because it is competing with microcontrollers.

It's people trying to use it as media center or PC that puzzle me. There it is indeed a piece of shit that isn't worth the price you pay for.

I do agree, but I would like to point out that it was originally designed for education purposes. Its original goal was to be a modern-day ZX spectrum (or BBC whatnot, I am too young to have known those -- and would have killed [ok, maybe not] for an Arduino or Raspi in my youth).

I find the little addition very nice, and I really like their approach of iterating over the product. I would like to buy one, but if the past is anything to go by, these will probably retail for ~€50 in the next few months :/

I currently use mine as an access point, and was disappointed with it being only 802.11g (54Mbps). The ac is a VERY nice addition. Are the drivers upstream yet? I am about to send back a TP Link USB ac adapter because of no upstream driver, that would be a nice improvement.

PoE was something that was repeatedly asked for, and seeing it finally made it opens a whole new range of opportunities. I know what my next Access point will be! Just put an Ethernet cable and be done with it. I actually suspect this will really drive up the number of "consumer"-oriented devices that support PoE.

Upgraded thermal management was not something absolutely crucial but is something nice to have as well

Overall really pleased with this update, I'll add one to my collection (2xB, 2B, 2x3B) ASAP. The nice thing with it is that it is well supported with OSS software (mali/vivante/adreno chips might improve in this regard depending on the driver progress, but Eric is officially an employee, which changes a lot!)

[Guest]

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.

Well, I don't want a $35 RPi. I want a $60 one with good specs.