Raspberry Pi impressions: the $35 Linux computer and tinker toy http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/01/raspberry-pi-impressions-the-35-linux-computer-and-tinker-toy/
If there's one place the Pi has been an unquestionable success, it's been on cost. ... the fact that it clocks in at a measly $35 for the advanced model is all the more impressive. Granted, it hits this Arduino-level price point by eschewing things like storage, a display, wireless radios and even a protective case. What you get instead, is a capable, but low-end ARM CPU with integrated RAM and a surprisingly powerful GPU on an exposed board with a small, but versatile assortment of connectivity options. [...] At the heart of the Pi is a Broadcom BCM2835 SOC. The 700MHz ARM11 core certainly isn't a barn burner. In fact, the foundation itself compares performance to a 300MHz Pentium II, but with "much, much swankier graphics" thanks to the Videocore 4 GPU. The chip itself is capable of not only decoding 1080p video, but of hitting Xbox (we're talking original, not 360) levels of 3D performance. In practice those claims seem to be about spot on. While some crafty devs have managed to get Quake III up and running on the diminutive Pi, it struggles to keep up with even modest modern demands. Firing up the Midori browser in the Debian "squeeze" distro suggested for use with the board and opening a couple of tabs is enough to bring the entire system to a standstill. In fact, simply launching Engadget was enough to pin the CPU and bring the OS to a standstill for at least a few minutes. And don't even think about watching streaming videos -- there is no support for Flash or HTML 5 at the moment. And, in case there was any doubt in your mind about how painful just web browsing could be on this thing, we ran SunSpider [JavaScript benchmark] (which also pinned the CPU) and got a score of 44,230. By comparison, our OG Droid (which is clocked at just 550MHz, but has the advantage of being a Cortex A8 chip) pulled a 11,188. On the software front, things are currently a tad underwhelming. You have your choice of three officially supported Linux variants (Debian Squeeze, Arch Linux ARM and QtonPi) and a port of XBMC, dubbed Raspbmc. [...] XBMC center fared slightly better in our testing, but not much. It boots up fast enough...and works more or less as advertised, provided you're the patient type. The now ubiquitous 1080p copy of Big Buck Bunny took about 15 to 20 seconds to load up from a USB key, but once it did, played reasonably smoothly... [...] Web-based content was a completely different story. We managed to install the Engadget and YouTube add-ons, but both failed to deliver. Launching an episode of the Engadget show took several minutes and, once the video began playing back, we were presented with what amounted to a slide show... Follow the link for more review details (like Debian performance) and pictures. This review makes it sound like the CPU is woefully underpowered for a media player application, and to an extent that merely adding hardware optimized drivers for the GPU isn't going to be a magic bullet. (You can't do everything in the GPU. You still need the CPU to shuttle bits around.) (If you've seen evidence to the contrary, post a reply.) Makes me wonder if the effort to port XBMC to this device was misplaced and is only going to lead to user frustration. You'd think the Raspberry Pi designers would have been aware of the capabilities and not misrepresented the product, or, if the media player idea came more from 3rd parties, discouraged that line of exploration, or at least added commentary on their blog warning of the limitations. (I don't think the designers explicitly said it was a great media player, but they did promote the effort to port XBMC by repeatedly noting it on their blog.) There's certainly plenty of other things you can do with a $35 Linux board. -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list Hardwarehacking@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
