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

[coder]

Imho the only thing worth moaning about is the ethernet shared with USB ports.

Um, and what about storage over the same USB hub? If you're going to moan about Ethernet, surely you should moan about the storage connectivity.

[caligula]

If you just want to run C code, step up from an arduino and have more flexibility and performance, the Rpi does embedded things well.

RPi doesn't do hard real-time embedded things well. It actually sucks if you use Linux. Arduino is a lot better if you need precise realtime processing cause it doesn't do thread scheduling, caching, or speculative execution.

[coder]

I've never really understood the enormous hate some people have for the Pi...

I got an original Pi model B+, and it was good for the time.

The problem is, it's > 6 years old and the I/O - one of the original Pi's weak spots - didn't really improve at all. If they'd made some real progress on that front, then I wouldn't even be complaining about the GPU. For a while, I was running mine as a headless media server - a task for which it was almost adequate. I loved that it was so low power I could just leave it up 24/7, without a second thought.

It's obviously supposed to be ... an easy entry point for people wanting to get into embedded systems.

Except it's not an embedded system. One of the things I loved about it was that it runs a full-fledged desktop distro. Like, if you couldn't see it, wouldn't even know it wasn't an early Pentium III or something.

I just can't fathom the thought process behind upgrading the CPU to a quad-A53 and not touching the I/O. There are plenty of competing SoC's to prove what's possible, even at that price point. They... just... didn't.

the communities around all the competing boards and families of them, ... are nowhere near the size of the community around the RPi and that's a genuinely valuable feather in it's hat.

Yeah, and just imagine how much better it would be if the Pi were a little more capable. Low-income people trying to use them as a desktop replacement - their original purpose - would have something much better suited to the task.

[M@yeulC]

And that's where most of the sales go. People that want to do small projects where an Arduino does not cut it.

Which makes you one of the "weird" ones that use it for something where it is crap and then praising it for no reason at all.

Really there are quite a few APs with PoE supported by OpenWrt that are much better and have open drivers (either mediatek or qualcomm/atheros) https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_ex...ply*%7E%5D=poe and overall would cost around the same, especially if used.
If it works for you then you just have very low needs.

If you say so. I'm certainly not the best positioned to judge this, but using it as an IoT gateway is only one of the things I use it for, and I'll try to explain jut a bit more my take on it.

Here are my "no-reasons":

• Cheap. That ought to be number one, just look at the X86 competition
• Polyvalent. While it doesn't excel at any task, it can do pretty much anything you ask of it.

Well, that's the most important. Then you have other niceties:

• Reasonably open, on all counts (and even more so with time). That means Desktop OGL, close-to-mainline kernel, etc.
• Big community, extremely common card meaning tons of add-ons (cases, software, etc), and generally well supported. Heck, you find your binaries on distros' websites.

I'm not even sure how the pi could be more polyvalent. SDR? IR LED? NFC? (the last two can be added pretty easily).
I love orange pis as well on paper, but they'll have to become more open before I buy some (given the raspi competing against them).

Thanks for the link, by the way, I wasn't aware that so many routers were supported by openwrt nowadays

[caligula]

I'm not even sure how the pi could be more polyvalent. SDR? IR LED? NFC? (the last two can be added pretty easily).

Maybe I'm missing something but aren't those provided by USB devices you can plug into any computer these days? Like.. since 2000. I started my SDR hobby with a cheap DVB stick and a x86 laptop. My NFC reader is USB connected.

[dungeon]

Improvments, but well power goes up a lot (RPi2 at load is where this one 3B+ idling )



https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/ra...cs-benchmarks/

Anyway, still cool for probably theoretical 6W max power draw computer... anyhow, no one expects to play AAA PC games of today on that - these probably needs 100 times more power

[pal666]

• 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.

lol. on all fronts except no gpu at all and costs 30% more. and how exactly odroid's poe is better?

[pal666]

Still powered over unreliable micro-USB?

i see you missed poe part

[pal666]

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 :-)

not exactly. you pay for gpu and get no gpu at all

[audir8]

RPi doesn't do hard real-time embedded things well. It actually sucks if you use Linux. Arduino is a lot better if you need precise realtime processing cause it doesn't do thread scheduling, caching, or speculative execution.

Arduino has no OS and also doesn't do threads, caching, or speculative execution. There is a huge difference in performance, 8 vs 32bit, 8Mhz vs 1.4Ghz among other constraints. With PREEMPT_RT in Linux on a RPi, you can service an interrupt every ~50us and do ~70k cycles of work. To do the same cycles of work in an arduino, your interrupt could only happen every ~10ms. I think people can pick which amount of hard real time performance they want/need.

Thanks for the board-db.org link. There are some good alternative boards out there (USB3+HDMI+Ethernet): https://www.board-db.org/search.php?...rice&order_d=a

Adding a USB3 dual-band wifi adapter to a PINE64 or Orange Pi makes more sense than getting an RPi 3B+, so, yeah, whatever deal RPi.org has with Broadcom could definitely use rewriting with atleast USB3 and some RISC-V eventually. Until then, just get a PINE64 or Orange Pi.