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Raspberry Pi


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http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/03/start/finally-16-pound-computer

This article was taken from the March 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Measuring just 85mm by 54mm and costing $25 (£16), the Raspberry Pi packs a punch. "It can do anything a PC can," says engineer Eben Upton, one of six Cambridge-based creators. At its heart is a Broadcom system-on-a-chip, and with 128MB of RAM it can run a full version of Linux-based system Fedora 15 as powerfully as a Pentium II machine.

Production of the more school-friendly £22 Model B (above) began in January, with the basic £16 Model A to follow soon. The Raspberry Pi Foundation wouldn't share its costs with us, so we asked Southampton University's electronics and computer science team to take an educated guess, based on a 100,000-unit run of Model A.

The costs:

HDMI port: 18p

USB port: 13p

Audio jack: 28p

SD card slot: 71p

And the rest:

Price estimates by Southampton university computer scientists...

BCM2835 SoC: £7

RCA video socket: 23p

Power socket: 13p

Regulator: 9p

Switches: 15p

Headers: 20p

Discrete devices: £1.80

Passive components: £1.50

PCB manufacture and assembly: £2.50

Marketing: 80p

Packaging: 30p

Total: £16

I love the first comment.

"... Can it run Crysis?" :lol:

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I love the first comment.

"... Can it run Crysis?" :lol:

It's actually pretty powerful - on a par with the Xbox 1.

The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode.

The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.

That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.

For the price, it'd be good for me as a dedicated music-making machine, but it'd have to have the case on it, then you factor in needing a monitor, runs in Linux (and the software I use doesn't run on Linux) and I might as well just buy a cheap (second) laptop.

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It's always the case. I remember when I was going to take the plunge into buying a computer. I was looking at Macs and the software I wanted with them outstripped the cost of the over expensive units they had on offer.

Thing is, almost every house in the UK must have a TV with a HDMI on now. Our family has been HD set and ready to go for ages, even the poor scuzzers that nobody bothers with because they claim the benefits.

What amazes me about this is that something that's about as big as a box of long matches can do what people are demonstrating. How long is it until this is just the norm? I mean, other companies will be looking at this to see if it is successful. That in turn will bring other competitors to the arena and then just like that you have competition to outdo each other on size/specs/price. I think we could possibly be witnessing the birth of something very special in these pocket sized PC's.

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What amazes me about this is that something that's about as big as a box of long matches can do what people are demonstrating. How long is it until this is just the norm? I mean, other companies will be looking at this to see if it is successful. That in turn will bring other competitors to the arena and then just like that you have competition to outdo each other on size/specs/price. I think we could possibly be witnessing the birth of something very special in these pocket sized PC's.

that's an interesting thought, i thought this was more aimed as an educational thing so people could learn to program, for schools and whatnot. but yeah it really could take off for other uses too as the price is really amazing. theres been small pc's you can just plug into tv's for a while now (bit bigger than this mind) but they're more like £100+

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  • 7 years later...

Couldnt see any other Raspberry Pi threads ,  any one else here enjoy the little wonders of awesomeness.

Had 3 or 4 different projects over the years, and just started my latest after wanting to go back and play the Amiga Classics of my childhood.

 

Have set up Amibian on a Pi 3b+  and got the kick roms running, so now boots into the floppy prompt.

Just need to add some adfs and set up a hard disk install of work bench, not a massive project but def nostalgia filled.

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Nice.

 

I keep threatning to build an arcade cabinet one day with pi inside running mame.

 

Guess i might as well wait for 4th revision now , hardest part for me tho would be biilding the cabinet.

 

My carpentry skills arent that great. ? 

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They replied more or less right away and managed to upload an avatar. There's no advertising crap in their sig or profile. I think they're more than likely legit. Only time will tell.

 

What a way to find a forum though, through googling a Pii thread.

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Latest Progress made have got the Pi booting directly into Workbench 3.1, Plenty of WHD's now on the mapped HD image,

It's Running largely an A1200 setup with 2 mb Ram but also added 4mb of Hard Ram as seems to have alleviated any issues with flickering nd sticking games on booting them.

Ordered a couple of Competition pro Joysticks for it as well.

 

Might setup another couple of Configurations running A2000 and A4000 machines, as seems the Pi is more than capable.

 

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16 hours ago, Snaggletooth said:

Latest Progress made have got the Pi booting directly into Workbench 3.1, Plenty of WHD's now on the mapped HD image,

It's Running largely an A1200 setup with 2 mb Ram but also added 4mb of Hard Ram as seems to have alleviated any issues with flickering nd sticking games on booting them.

Ordered a couple of Competition pro Joysticks for it as well.

 

Might setup another couple of Configurations running A2000 and A4000 machines, as seems the Pi is more than capable.

 

 

I might have a crack at this myself - how easy is it to locate the software? Last time I tried emulating an Amiga I couldn't get hold of workbench.

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