Friday, November 25th 2011
Raspberry Pi: the Upcoming $25 1080p-Capable ARM-Based Hobby Computer
Yes, you heard that right, when completed, the Raspberry Pi foundation will be selling a credit card sized computer running Linux that can plug into your television and play H.264 1080p30 videos. Raspberry Pi is the somewhat cheekily-named UK registered charity which has been set up to design and build a very low cost computer that is targeted for use in computer science lessons in schools, to "put the fun back into learning computing." Why, was it ever not fun?! However, such a simple and cheap general purpose gadget has the potential for many other uses than the classroom, as the world is full of inventive tech-minded people that can tinker with something like this and build innovative projects with them, perhaps by using several of these together.
The product will come in two configurations, a $25 Model A with 128 MB SDRAM & $35 Model B with 256 MB SDRAM and both will come with the same 700 MHz Broadcom BCM2835 media processor featuring an ARM11 (ARM1176JZF-S) core, Broadcom GPU core, DSP core and support for Package-on-Package (PoP) RAM. We expect that in this day and age, most people will go for the 256 MB model, which is still a very small amount of RAM. For those that want to get the most out if this device, the website - www.raspberrypi.org - has a forum and a wiki with tons of technical details on the device, including benchmarks and links to many other news stories & blogs about the product. There's even a shop, although at the moment, it's only selling keyboard stickers of the foundation's logo.
Note that the target price of $25/$35 is a hard limit, so the standard feature set is limited by this. One example is that it has no analog VGA output, since this would require conversion electronics that would increase the price. The wiki however, does provide links to suppliers of HDMI to VGA adapters. This computer is expected to be available in December in the UK and possibly the US. In the pictures above, the diagram on the right is the final PCB artwork and the provisional specification is shown below:
The product will come in two configurations, a $25 Model A with 128 MB SDRAM & $35 Model B with 256 MB SDRAM and both will come with the same 700 MHz Broadcom BCM2835 media processor featuring an ARM11 (ARM1176JZF-S) core, Broadcom GPU core, DSP core and support for Package-on-Package (PoP) RAM. We expect that in this day and age, most people will go for the 256 MB model, which is still a very small amount of RAM. For those that want to get the most out if this device, the website - www.raspberrypi.org - has a forum and a wiki with tons of technical details on the device, including benchmarks and links to many other news stories & blogs about the product. There's even a shop, although at the moment, it's only selling keyboard stickers of the foundation's logo.
- 700 MHz Broadcom BCM2835 media processor featuring an ARM11 (ARM1176JZF-S) core, Broadcom GPU core, DSP core and support for Package-on-Package (PoP) RAM
- 128 MB (Model A) or 256MB of SDRAM (Model B), stacked on top of the CPU as a PoP device
- OpenGL ES 2.0
- 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
- Composite and HDMI video output
- One USB 2.0 port provided by the BCM2835
- SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
- General-purpose I/O (About 16 3v3) and various other interfaces, brought out to 1.27 mm pin-strip
- Optional integrated 2-port USB hub and 10/100 Ethernet controller (Model B)
- Open software (Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)
- Capability to support various expansion boards
52 Comments on Raspberry Pi: the Upcoming $25 1080p-Capable ARM-Based Hobby Computer
This could be good for a pushbike, with a rear facing cam and a small screen mounted on the handlebars? Doesnt seem quite powerful enough at its current spec.
Good idea though.
I doubt you could run Windows 7 on 700Mhz ARM.
And you should now (as a TPU member) that Linux and BSD, especially when properly adapted to the hardware that is used, is more leightweight than Windows.
And this is mainly meant to fiddle with and to practice programming on, as it seems.
www.stumpie.com/armeval/
www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/4617/Acorn-ARM-Evaluation-System
www.heyrick.co.uk/assembler/proctype.html
1985 to anyone that is interested in retro/classic computing :)
I remember it being "unbelievable" when it came out. The performance was not a % or double of existing systems. It was like 20-100x faster depending on what it was doing. Reason? It was 32-bit and had 25 separate registers, whereas, the CPUs of the time (excluding mainframes) were 8-bit with just 3x 8-bit registers and perhaps 1x or 2x hybrid 16bit registers.
So old 8-bit code was constantly swapping registers and PUSHing and PULLing to the stack. So there was a lot of "overhead" to actual computation time. Any 16, 32 or float calculations required a lot of lengthy routines and scratch space using memory as virtual registers. This was slow. Multiply didnt exist in 8-bit (typically) whereas these new processes had a MUL instruction.
Incredible breakthrough at the time.
Do wantwantwant noew!
@C Bonkers: When was that released?
Oh, and here we can see it playing Quake 3!
I think the Z80 had a multiply instruction, but it's been so long now, I'm not sure.
@qubit. No. Z80 had no Multiply. You had to do it with a series of adds and binary rotates (multiply by 2 in binary means shift all 1 and 0 to the left).
Here is someone showing you how to do it on the Z80
sgate.emt.bme.hu/patai/publications/z80guide/part4.html
IIRC, the Comodore 64 used a "special" 6509 processor called the 6510 which DID have a simple 8bit hardware multiply for one of its registers. It wasnt a "true" multiply, but it helped the coding significantly, meaning long-hand multiply as shown in the link above could be simplified and be about 4-5x times quicker. DIVIDE was still a PITA.
Remember that 8 and 16 bit integer multiple is EASY PEASY compared to the code needed on 8-bit processors to do floating point! Now THOSE PROGRAMMERS I really admire.
6502.org/source/floats/wozfp1.txt / 6502.org/source/floats/wozfp3.txt
Steve Wozniak (and friends). Genius.
Now to think of something to do with 48 ARMS.
The C64 and the 6510, I always did wonder what that variant did.
Hmm... may not have a need for a toaster with an ARM cluster. But I wonder if they would make good thin clients. Plug in into a TV, connect up to other computers in the house.
I actually think that the BBC Basic ROM, a full Basic Interpreter and 6502 Assembler, built within 16K, was one of the best "codings" of all time. How so much was squeezed into so little space, and how routines were designed to be re-usable by other functions. When the 65C02 came out, which added just 7 new instructions: PHX PHY PLX PLY INC A DEC A and STZ, Acorn developed Basic 4 that fitted an even better expanded BASIC, increased floating point accuracy by one digit, and even speeded up the interpreter, and all into the same 16K space. It is one of the "Wonders of the Programming World". It's up there with DOOM, HTML, Google Earth/Maps, etc.If you are happy to use ARM rather than x86 in the car, consider something like this with display included.
www.watterott.com/de/Boards-Kits/ARM/ARM11
Actually that whole website is fascinating... build your own robots etc. Website is a mix of english and german.
Err. Look what I just found on that website. This is what The W1zzard wears at parties! LED cufflinks! LOL www.watterott.com/de/iCufflinks-v10