http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16316439
Arm based PC for £22? Bargain, it even plays quake3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mDuJuvZjI
Bargain tbh :)
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16316439
Arm based PC for £22? Bargain, it even plays quake3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mDuJuvZjI
Bargain tbh :)
But can it play Elite? ;)
PS my good wife points out there's a p in raspberry ;)
Definitely interested in one of these as well
An extra 37% price hike for a network connector :mrgreen:
I really hope their idea works.....might even pick one up myself to play with.
Haha, I had no idea it was powerful enough to play Quake 3, brilliant :)
I was going to get one as a leaving present for a mate who's going travelling. Might have to get one myself, just because..
The first 10 boards sold for over £15k on eBay with the proceeds going towards funding the charity arm (ha!) of the company.
Interesting piece on their website (here) about manufacturing costs and how they wanted to keep it all UK based.
Very tempted to get one of these.
With David Braben involved - I'd be surprised if there isn't a version of Elite available :)
XBMC apparently already done :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=iKhnoQMwjmQ
Here's it playing quake:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mDu...eature=related
Hehe, the Pi is definitely something I want, and solely to run RISC OS, I'm terribly nostalgic, and its a damned sight smaller than my A7000.
Sadly, the ARM used doesn't provide the old 26-bit mode and you'd, apparently, require a software emulator to play old games :(
I am disappointed by the CPU in the Pi. A few more pounds would have meant a totally different class of device, or one which can actually use a fully Open Source linux distro, or both
The CPU core is the same as from the iPhone 1, albeit at 50% higher clock speed.
But really, that's not the main issue.
There are two big problems with Pi's Broadcom SoC
The first is an architecture issue. Unlike x86, ARM is more like one of those blend-your-own-milkshake places. Pick a base instruction set, add on extensions to make it usable. The core instruction set on the Pi is ARMv6. There's talk of running Ubuntu on the Pi... except Ubuntu has required ARMv7 with Thumb2 extensions for a couple of releases now
The second related issue is one of freedom. the boot loader on the Broadcom is built into the GPU - i.e. the GPU takes a kernel image, prepared using a special closed-source tool, then boots it on the CPU. But since we're on ARMv6, we need an ARMv6 distro - and the biggest and best tested, Debian, will never ship kernels that require a closed-source tool to build.
*Any* ARMv7 SoC would have made an enormous difference, even down at the single-core 700MHz range. Say a Freescale i.MX515
We're not talking about binary drivers (of which there are a bunch), but getting the kernel - any kernel - to boot needing the kernel image to be packed by a binary-only tool for i386. You can't build a new kernel on the Pi and boot it, for example. ARM boot loaders are all terrible, this is more terrible than most.
Sounds like it needs a second stage bootloader built with the closed source tool, and then that could boot a vanilla Linux kernel.
Due to the stupid import duties in this country the units will be made in the Far East:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509
Some videos of the hardware in action:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509
I will totally be buying one of these. They look awesome for messing about with :D
With the Pi costing £22 and Beagleboard / pandaboard costing £150 (as much as a netbook..!) is it any wonder?
You have piqued my interest in pandabaord, as apparently it already runs Android ICS: http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/elec...daboard/38636/
http://www.seductionmeals.com/fresh_raspberry_pie.jpg
sorrry couldn't resist it any longer.
Is there any actual release date yet?
I dont know what I`d use it for but I want one lol
All I want right now is a slice of the pie!
I think you're young enough to have missed the BBC Model B, and the huge impact it had on computer skills throughout the UK. The surplus of competent UK game developers in the 80's and 90's can be traced back to the BBC and other program-yourself systems of the era
Hex hits two nails on both their respective heads again.
While I fully fully aplaud the Rpi, to have literally gone the extra few quid, the extra mile, while cutting out maybe a few % of purchases, it would have had a hugely longer life, larger scale of dev potential AND therefore rewarded more people for longer.
And the BBC Model B was a life changing experience. The Spectrum and C64, while amazingly worthy, didn't quite hit the spot with the upper echelons... and the BBC Model B just did.
Me: Spectrum boy.
but I lusted after a B too......
Having lived through the Beeb micro era, I'm not sure that it can claim entire responsibility for teaching programming despite there being a beeb in many/most schools.
A single BBC machine was usually in the maths department displaying the odd graph - not exactly one per child!
Yes it was a good machine, but it was way too expensive (something like £400 when spectrums were £129)
the masses had Spectrums etc at home and learned to program on those.
In one way they were better than modern computers:
Boot time was instant, as the OS was on ROM chips (also meant it never corrupted!)
I think you have something there.
The unifying theme of the old 8 bit machines was that the command line was a bundled programming environment.
I had a TRS-80 clone followed by a Dragon 32. Beeb was too expensive, so taught me nothing :)
As a student my Atari ST came with Basic still (though by then I was compiling in C so ignored it).