Raspberry Pi 2 Launches With Quad-Core ARM SoC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi 2 Launches With Quad-Core ARM SoC

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the release of the Raspberry Pi 2, their first multi-core, ARMv7 single board computer...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-2-Launches

[tarceri]

This time around it looks like its the Foundation thats sold out rather than the Pi.

[darkbasic]

It has the same GPU: this explain why they started working on FOSS drivers so late.

[SystemCrasher]

So, finally on par with cheap chinese boards in terms price to performance ratio.

And as usually silent on couple of not so convenient things, eh?
1) What about Ethernet? Is is as crappy as on older Pis? Cheap $35 chinese boards are coming with REAL gigabit Ethernet. Not some weird usb to ethernet shit used by PIs.
2) Cheap chinese boards are coming with a real (AHCI) SATA. What about storage on this one? Crappy USB again?
3) So much buzz about VideoCore "openness"... but in fact most of GL features are implemented in firmware blob-only OS, so "open" specs are misnomer as "open driver" is just thin translation layer to proprietary blob.
4) Pi also known for moron boot sequence where GPU starts first and then boots CPU. This means there're some blobs you can't get rid of and weird requirements like FAT32 partition (why on Earth one needs this anciend DOS crap in 2015?)

[wizard69]

Performance reporting would be nice. A short but sweet review would be nice too.

This ought to give the Rasberry PI a serious performance boost making it far more useful for those little embedded projects.

[[Knuckles]]

This time around it looks like its the Foundation thats sold out rather than the Pi.

Yeap... It's for education, and all that, so let's educate a new generation on doing embedded windows! Because that turned out great last time!

[blcollier]

So, finally on par with cheap chinese boards in terms price to performance ratio.

And as usually silent on couple of not so convenient things, eh?
1) What about Ethernet? Is is as crappy as on older Pis? Cheap $35 chinese boards are coming with REAL gigabit Ethernet. Not some weird usb to ethernet shit used by PIs.
2) Cheap chinese boards are coming with a real (AHCI) SATA. What about storage on this one? Crappy USB again?
3) So much buzz about VideoCore "openness"... but in fact most of GL features are implemented in firmware blob-only OS, so "open" specs are misnomer as "open driver" is just thin translation layer to proprietary blob.
4) Pi also known for moron boot sequence where GPU starts first and then boots CPU. This means there're some blobs you can't get rid of and weird requirements like FAT32 partition (why on Earth one needs this anciend DOS crap in 2015?)

The original BCM2835 was a GPU with an ARM core strapped on to it - it was designed for embedded media applications. Hence the weird boot sequence, binary blobs, etc.

There are plenty of competitors out there, so if the Pi doesn't have the features you want then feel free to go and buy something else. Most of them probably wouldn't exist had the Pi never been released - or at least wouldn't be anywhere near as cheap - but let's just ignore that for a moment and enjoy the freedom of not buying something you don't want.

[DataPath]

So, finally on par with cheap chinese boards in terms price to performance ratio.

And as usually silent on couple of not so convenient things, eh?
1) What about Ethernet? Is is as crappy as on older Pis? Cheap $35 chinese boards are coming with REAL gigabit Ethernet. Not some weird usb to ethernet shit used by PIs.
2) Cheap chinese boards are coming with a real (AHCI) SATA. What about storage on this one? Crappy USB again?
3) So much buzz about VideoCore "openness"... but in fact most of GL features are implemented in firmware blob-only OS, so "open" specs are misnomer as "open driver" is just thin translation layer to proprietary blob.
4) Pi also known for moron boot sequence where GPU starts first and then boots CPU. This means there're some blobs you can't get rid of and weird requirements like FAT32 partition (why on Earth one needs this anciend DOS crap in 2015?)

I won't answer #1 and 2 because neither subject is really interesting to me.

For #3, Broadcom has hired Eric Anholt (formerly of Intel, and worked on Mesa support for Intel graphics) to develop a truly open linux graphics driver.

For #4, it's complicated and the reasons actually make sense if you take the time to understand them, but the short version is that ARM architectures lack much of the automated system bootstrapping and device configuration that you're used to seeing on x86, so hardware logic has to be implemented *somewhere* to bring up the various processing units. It could be done on the CPU, but since device manufacturers don't own the ARM HDL, but rather just license it and are dependent on ARM (to varying degrees depending on the type of license they get, the amount of in-house expertise they have, etc) for updates and fixes (and even with full in-house expertise on the ARM HDL, every customization you make is customization you have to re-do when you pull in a new core from ARM), it's not unreasonable to implement bootstrapping off-CPU.

Also, you're clearly very ignorant of how the RPi boot process actually works. The first stage bootloader is factory programmed into the RPi, and that's where the FAT32 logic is implemented. They could just as easily program in a BTRFS first stage bootloader, but that would do much more to limit the reach and appeal of the RPi than FAT32 does, because the RPi isn't a "linux device". And for a filesystem that's only needed for loading device firmware, there's absolutely nothing wrong with FAT32. Or are you thinking that journaling, snapshots, and device pooling add some kind of value here?

[kusma]

So much buzz about VideoCore "openness"... but in fact most of GL features are implemented in firmware blob-only OS, so "open" specs are misnomer as "open driver" is just thin translation layer to proprietary blob.

They remedied that already:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/src/gallium/drivers/vc4

[AnonymousCoward]

I would be interested to the performance comparison to the ODROID-C1 since they both cost $35.

Please make a comparison, michael .