[GTALUG] Raspberry Pi 3 already!

[Anthony de Boer]

D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> and just two months after I bought a Pi 2 from Microsoft Store.

A friend of mine in .nl says he got physical delivery of an RPi3
already earlier today.

Not just hype it seems; too many product announcements have no apparent
link to present-day reality.

> Here are some highlights, possibly inaccurately remembered.
> 
> Better
> - Arm A53: significantly faster than the A7(?) in the Pi 2.  64-bit
> 
> - built in bluetooth and WiFi.  These apparently go through SDIO, 
>   bypassing the USB bottleneck.

And in a lot of applications built-in wifi will cover your networking
needs, freeing up USB bandwidth entirely for other uses and saving a
cable's worth of clutter.  (And when each cable is another chance to haul
the poor wee computer straight off your desk that has to count for
something!)

> - faster clocking for the GPU (I think)
> 
> Worse:
> 
> - takes more power to run.  You might need a new power supply

As long as it's still happy running fanless I'm happy too.

> Same:
> 
> - no price increase!
> 
> - same case and peripherals as Pi 2 (but LEDs move)
> 
> - all USB is 2.0 (no USB 3.x)
> 
> - too much goes through a single internal USB 2.0 bus (ethernet, 
>   4 usb ports)
> 
> - although the processor is 64-bit, the software is still 32-bit.  I hope 
>   that this will change.

It's early in the day everywhere for 64-bit ARM.  It's a release
architecture in Debian Jessie, though, so the software exists.

Although the original Raspberry Pi had a bit of a weak processor and
required a custom respin for that chip (Seneca at York's Fedora, or
Raspbian) RPi2 supports real armhf[0] and one expects similar work will
see 64-bit Jessie running on the RPi3.  And with any luck all this will
be integrated into the vanilla distro for the next release.

[0] https://www.collabora.com/about-us/blog/2015/02/03/debian-jessie-on-raspberry-pi-2/

> - 1G of RAM

Remember when having the full 64K address space populated was still
considered pretty nifty?

-- 
Anthony de Boer