RasberryPi release date February 20th

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/615

by aespinoza • 14 years ago

108 53 14 years ago

detst• 14 years ago

"RasberryPi release date February 20th". No.

FTA: "[T]he boards will be finished on February 20. [...] [Y]ou should be able to buy them before the end of the month."

catch23• 14 years ago

There's only 10,000 units in this batch. I'm guessing it will be sold out in an hour or two.

dekz• 14 years ago

I'm under the impression that you can only purchase 1 per person (or per transaction?). So group and bulk buys are out of the question. 10,000 units might last a bit longer than 1-2 hours, but only time will tell.

adestefan3• 14 years ago

Just wait a couple of months and you'll probably be able to pick one up on the cheap from people looking to offload something sitting around. These are a lot less powerful and have a lot fewer connectivity options, unless you want to do some soldering, then people are believing. It also doesn't help that the main selling point (accelerated graphics) will be shipping as a binary blob.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Wow, looking at the data sheet BroadCom provided has confirmed my worst fears. Comments like:

There are a number of peripherals which are intended to be controlled by the GPU. These are omitted from this datasheet. Accessing these peripherals from the ARM is not recommended.

There is of course no documentation at all for the GPU, if you run Linux on this thing you are at Broadcom's mercy for maybe giving you a binary blob which might run the GPU in an acceptable manner but no promises.

This is such a sad state of affairs. Where a chip company refuses to divulge information that is critical to using their chip.

Say what you want about the OLPC but like Stallman's laptop the damn thing had pretty good documentation on all the parts. I guess its finally time for an open source SOC.

jff• 14 years ago

And if you want to run something that isn't Linux, you're completely out of luck with those peripherals, because we will not be told the information needed to write our own drivers. Broadcom are notorious for being shitheads about this kind of thing, although they're not the only ones.

rwg• 14 years ago

At FUDCon last month, Chris Tyler from Seneca College gave a presentation about the Raspberry Pi. I don't remember his exact quote, but he said that the vast majority of the die space of the chip was devoted to the GPU and it was best to think of the chip as a big awesome GPU with a tiny little ARM core shoved in a corner of the die, almost as an afterthought.

Given that, it certainly is a tragedy that the GPU is completely undocumented.

tkn1454• 14 years ago

Well then what are you waiting for? Start your own chip company.

We get it. Broadcom doesn't release specs for their parts. Their market cap is 20 billion dollars, so all the open source sanctimony won't dent them a bit.

luser001• 14 years ago

Yes, I agree that a documented chip is better than an undocumented one.

But I, for one, am ecstatic that I will finally be able put a few boxes here and there around my house for various automation tasks.

Running Linux itself is a HUGE step towards openness. I actually don't care about the GPU.

The closest thing (in price+performance+flexibility) are open-source-compatible routers onto which I can try loading up an openwrt-derived distro (4 MB RAM, 4 MB Flash) or expensive Arduino boards, plug computers etc! This is a giant leap forward, and I am grateful to Raspberry Pi/Broadcom for trying to make a tinkerer-friendly board like this.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Well you would be better off with an Atmel SAM9 or the Marvell chip (used in the Pogoplug). Of course the BeagleBone [1] (OMAP) is $89 and runs Linux (and its shipping now, has a great community, blah blah blah.) The key being the documentation of course. I was hoping for a machine with a usable HDMI implementation that I could run a custom software load on. Can sell a million of those. R.Pi is not that board apparently. I'm looking at the STM32F [2] which is a Cortex M4 design which I am pretty sure I can get a Linux kernel running on (no video) and it should cost about $30 configured as I'd like (ethernet, serial, USB (for hard drive), and an extra 128MB of memory using PSM ram.

[1] http://beagleboard.org/bone

[2] http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/250863.jsp

sliverstorm4• 14 years ago

aka, a documented chip is better than an undocumented chip- but an undocumented chip is better than no chip at all.

Cieplak2• 14 years ago

Binary Blob Question

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/general-discussion/gpu-bina...

Could there be malicious software embedded in the closed-source drivers?

wmf5• 14 years ago

What would Broadcom stand to gain?

theon144• 14 years ago

Most definitely, otherwise opensource software wouldn't be that big of a deal. It's not very probable though, they don't have much to gain by doing it.

newhouseb• 14 years ago

Could someone privately buy more information about the GPU? i.e. does it exist? Is it held private because some vendor OS has paid them for exclusivity rights? I really don't understand the business strategy behind such secrecy.

wmf5• 14 years ago

Broadcom would probably give you GPU documentation under NDA as long as you don't release any code you write and you don't tell anyone how bad their GPU is.

genbattle• 14 years ago

There are a number of peripherals which are intended to be controlled by the GPU. These are omitted from this datasheet. Accessing these peripherals from the ARM is not recommended.

I can understand them not wanting you to access the GPU peripherals from the ARM processor, the GPU can handle out-of-order data access, but the ARM core cannot (although it sounds like you can get around it with some careful programming).

At this stage i'm happy we got anything out of them at all, limited as it may be. A datasheet for the GPU would be great though. But given the progress of Open Source drivers from the groups working with AMD and Nvidia (who are much more forthcoming than the embedded graphics vendors), I can't say I would prefer to wait 3 years for a functioning driver that can handle OpenGL ES 2.0 and accelerated video playback. You'll still need a binary blob in the meantime. And it's not feasible for them to just give away their driver source for free in the meantime, for the same reasons it was never feasible for nvidia or AMD to just open up their proprietary drivers.

I think in time the situation will improve, but you can't expect Raspberry Pi to reverse standard industry practices in a single leap and bound. Give it time, and see this release for what it is: progress.

slowpoke5• 14 years ago

>And it's not feasible for them to just give away their driver source for free in the meantime, for the same reasons it was never feasible for nvidia or AMD to just open up their proprietary drivers.

Why? For what reason? All they are doing is inconveniencing users and developers alike. I see exactly zero reason to keep drivers closed. Nada. Null. Nobody gains anything by keeping drivers closed. It's a waste of time and resources.

gravitronic• 14 years ago

You are 100% correct.

The thing you have to realize is that at this price point we're pretty much at Broadcom's mercy. Comparable chips are not sold as complete boards for $25-$35. They're doing raspberrypi a favor by even selling them at much lower volume than they'd normally sell them.

Aside from Raspberry Pi, No person or company who is not a Broadcom partner shipping millions per year can even buy this chip.

duaneb• 14 years ago

Can't wait; I want a slow ARM test machine for my code. This will be perfect.

joezydeco4• 14 years ago

Why dont't you just find a cheap Cortex M3 eval board, then?

http://www.amazon.com/SainSmart-STM32F103RBT6-Cortex-M3-Deve...

(example, not an endorsement)

Or hack a Gameboy Advance. ARM hobby boards have existed long before Raspberry Pi. Or is it the linux distro and easy video that's so appealing?

dorianj• 14 years ago

Cortex M3 is an excellent microcontroller, but not much more. It critically lacks a memory manager, meaning it can't run Linux or other full-featured operating systems. You also run into severe memory/flash limits.

tesseract2• 14 years ago

Cortex M3 doesn't have an MMU so it won't run Linux or other desktop style operating systems. Generally they are programmed 'on the bare metal' or with a fairly lightweight RTOS. So depending on what duaneb wants to do it may not be appropriate.

If the idea is just "find out how well my code runs on a slow machine" a OpenWRT box is probably a decent bet. They are often MIPS core based but when programming in a high level language that doesn't really matter.

fr0sty• 14 years ago

I think the $25 price point is a major draw. Your example board with fewer features is $60...

RasberryPi release date February 20th

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