Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 Launched

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 Launched

The Raspberry Pi Foundation this morning announced the Compute Module 3 (CM3) as the successor to their original Compute Module...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RPi-Compute-Module-3

[speculatrix]

"4Gb of eMMC"

so just 512MB of eMMC?

[dh04000]

"4Gb of eMMC"

so just 512MB of eMMC?

4 GB of eMMC

[M@GOid]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the use case for these? You plug it in a DDR2 slot, is that correct?

[dungeon]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the use case for these? You plug it in a DDR2 slot, is that correct?

It is for hardware developers... a way to incorporate RPi 3 tech into some other products. You need some ARM dev board i guess where you put this.

[starshipeleven]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the use case for these? You plug it in a DDR2 slot, is that correct?

Mechanically it is a DDR2 DIMM, electrically NOT ANYWHERE NEAR a DDR2 DIMM. They are reusing pre-made connectors for another interface (it's common to see PCIe connectors in embedded or other custom designs, but they are NOT PCIe, only using that connector because it's cheap and easily available).

The Raspi CM is designed for cheap board manufacturing of embedded devices, just like many other embedded (like NXP stuff, see here http://www.wandboard.org/ ) that provide a tiny "motherboard" with the SoC, RAM and main storage designed to be mounted on a device-specific daughterboard that only provides connectivity and device-specific functions for that. The OEM only needs to design and produce the daughterboard (which is going to be a bunch of passive components and simple stuff on average, so pretty cheap to design and make), while buying the "motherboard" module from the same source.
This way the "motherboard" manufacturer is producing modules for many different OEMs and thus increasing dramatically their production runs so they can keep prices down.

This is a generic daughterboard for the old raspi CM (it is basically a development daughterboard, exposing all the traces available on that DIMM module), the module is designed to go on a custom daughterboard.


It has more connectivity than a raspi, but is also larger. A real daughterboard will be custom-made for each product the raspi CM is used in.

[dh04000]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the use case for these? You plug it in a DDR2 slot, is that correct?

The slice (http://fiveninjas.com/index.html) is an example of a raspberrypi compute module powered device where the module snaps into a internal daughterboard that exposes more interfaces that a standard RPi3 would.

[speculatrix]

4 GB of eMMC

no, Michael originally wrote 4 gigabits (Gb) not 4 gigabytes (4GB), but I see he corrected it.

[M@GOid]

Okay, I get it now. Tanks for all the answers.