The Raspberry Pi Turns One 81
hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi turned one yesterday. Raspberry Pi was first launched on 29 February 2012 in the UK and it was received with a huge amount of enthusiasm by students and researchers alike. The Pi has had quite an eventful year, with researchers building a Raspberry Pi cluster; release of an official turbo mode patch; a 512 MB RAM upgrade; the launch of a Pi Store; sales of over a million units; and release of the Minecraft Pocket Edition."
Re: Obsolete Processor (Score:5, Insightful)
Hard to believe (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Obsolete Processor (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not an obsolete processor. It's a SoC designed for a VERY specific use case - a media player.
It's got a top-notch GPU with video decode and 3D graphics (VideoCore 4), making it ideal for media playback. Broadcom threw a lowly ARM core there to handle thee UI and other tasks (like the care and feeding of the VC4 - from network, USB, or other sources of media). For that, you don't need a high end processor, but by integrating the two, a media player only needs a single chip solution that's cheap. No need to add an external processor that would probably be overpowered for the purpose, then need to handle multiple power rails and memory and other things.
It's a very purpose build ASIC. That's why it's cheap - it was designed for a media player that costs $99 retail like a Roku or AppleTV or other media box. It's got a powerful GPU to handle the video, and a lightweight ARM to handle UI, and feeding the media to the GPU.
It's also why it can be a dog-slow processor that can still do impressive graphics at 1080p or play video at 1080p.
Fascinating! And congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of these days I'll probably get one just for fun...
Now that the Raspberry Pi even has its own "Raspbmc" XBMC distribution, I could just as well have used one for my living-room audio/video needs instead of the cheap netbook I bought. (Which was no bad choice either, although driver issues forced me to use Windows instead of Linux, which otherwise would have been just perfect.)
What makes it so fascinating: it's extremely cheap, it's a great gadget for learning and experimenting with hard- and software, and at the same time it's powerful enough to be employed for quite some serious real-world computing tasks.
And by the way, in a world that is being choked to death by an economic system based on profit maximization, forcing more and more people to tighten their belts even in the rich industrialized regions while the objective requirements for universal affluence and well-being, i.e. resources, productivity and workforce, have never been available in such an abundance, inventions like the Raspberry Pi will probably become more and more important for people.