Raspberry Pi 2 unveiled with faster processor and more memory


but its makers have also promised it will be able to support Microsoft's next operating system at a later date.


"For the last six months we've been working closely with Microsoft to bring the forthcoming Windows 10 to Raspberry Pi 2. Microsoft will have much more to share over the coming months,"
vomiting_pumpkin.jpg
 
Entire Quad Core ARM PC for 30 Dollars and Win10 Compatibility? Not bad. :)  How is this SOC compared to the upcoming Pyra? Well, I guess it's at least cheaper but if Win 10 (RT?)  can run on an Pi, I guess it could also run on the Pyra much better. ^^
 
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and Win10 Compatibility?
win 10 RT, which is not WIn 10.

How is this SOC compared to the upcoming Pyra?
It's old, it's ARM7 architecture, albeit with 4 cores. The Pyra should be much faster.

I guess it could also run on the Pyra much better
You won't get Win 10 on Pyra unless Microsoft decides to support it.

outperform Odroid C1 which is the same price: http://www.hardkerne...s/prdt_info.php
Wow, did not know the odroid was at the same price ! Is anything better in the raspberry pi, in terms of ports or something?
 
It's not ARM7, it's a CortexA7, so basically, four times a Pandora processor.


Don't know which CPU Speed the Pi2 runs with though.
 
Still no NEON support...  Oh nvm it IS ARMV7 which has NEON.. so cool. 
 
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I've now realised having owned a CC Pandora that it's not all about the numbers, the quality of the software helps tremendously.

However there are limitations so a bit more horse power can help.

I just hope we don't get into the same situation as desktop PC's with these mini PC's, if the software runs slow don't bother to optimize it just say the user needs a higher spec machine.

All these years later I am still impressed with what the coders managed to do with 48/64k on processors that ran at single figure MHz.

Amiga Workbench on 1 floppy with 512mb @7.14MHz you sir are a legend.

I better sign off now I have a tear in my eye. :)
 
Wow, did not know the odroid was at the same price ! Is anything better in the raspberry pi, in terms of ports or something?
Odroid C1 is pretty much an RPi clone with improvements. The form factor is very similar, and Odroid C1 even made 37 of the header ports compatible with their function on RPi. The parts that are missing are the touchscreen port, camera port, and analog video/audio - so for some applications RPi might be better. And it has a mini-HDMI port instead of RPi's full sized HDMI. But in addition to the much faster SoC and more RAM vs the B+ RPi (and in some ways the SoC is better than RPi 2's), it also has gigabit ethernet and an eMMC expansion port.

I actually suspect that this device forced RPi's hand into updating the SoC and RAM.
 
It`s actually 800...but will clock to 900.

according to the foundation website.
There's a comment on the announcement page that addresses this:

"All Raspberry Pi 2s are production-tested for 900MHz and so the default clock settings for the shipped firmware run at 900MHz.

This was an improvement that came quite late in the pre-release cycle (required testing on the production line to be implemented) thus documentation may not yet be quite up to speed."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-2-on-sale/

Maybe there's documentation for the SoC itself that says 800MHz, and maybe that number was too conservative or they're accepting some bin rejections to meet a higher target. But RPi 2's spec is not 800MHz in any meaningful sense.

Also:

“We were being conservative on the frequency in case we encountered issues in production. In practice, we’ve found we’re fine at 900MHz, with significant overclocking headroom over that."

This isn't really surprising, even 900MHz is low for a Cortex-A7 these days, although that's subject to a lot of implementation details of the SoC.
 
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Specs look decent.

History tells us their community will get the the most out of it.

Ordered one.
 
Specs look decent.

History tells us their community will get the the most out of it.

Ordered one.
Ditto. A stripped-down Raspbian which autoboots into SpecBAS (well, modified PandaBAS) on an SD Card, inside a Spectrum 48k case with the Pi2 extended out to the port cutouts will make an excellent little retro-styled BASIC machine :)

Edit: And PandaBAS will run a lot faster on this than it does on Pandora - quad core with hardfp? Oh my.

D.
 
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I found this blog which gave some more information on the SoC, particularly it revealed the L2 cache size as 512KB, although I was already pretty sure that's what it'd be.

http://jamesrandominfo.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/raspberry-pi-2-b-first-impressions.html

These comments caught my attention...

"It’s worth comparing the A7 cores with the A5 cores used on some other SBC’s. The A5 is a dramatically cut down version of the A7. It uses the same Armv7 instruction set but has a much smaller silicon area and has a lot of performance features removed, resulting in capabilities not much better than an ARMv6 device. They are capable of higher clock speeds, but this benefit is offset by the poor instructions execution speed. So a A7 usually outperforms an A5, even one running at a higher clock speed."

"but for $35, there is nothing to touch the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B+"

This makes it even more obvious to me that RPi 2 is a conscious response to Odroid C1. A5 isn't a cut down A7 though, it came out first - it's more like A7 is the successor to A5.. and a surprisingly small (on paper, anyway) number of changes made a surprisingly big performance difference. A5's performance really is pretty bad, and this is the first I've heard about it being able to clock higher than A7 (I think Hardkernel is just very aggressive with clock speeds, this is true with a lot of their stuff). But I don't think that the difference is so great that typical apps won't be faster on the C1 than the RPi.

For some apps things may be different. For example: A7's NEON performance is worse (per-clock) than A8's, but A5's in turn is much worse than A7's. I think about half the performance. It's hard to know exactly because there's almost no documentation on it; for some reason ARM's TRMs have become barren of performance data since Cortex-A9. But my experience from end users is that A5 is really, really bad with DraStic, for example.
 
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Edit: And PandaBAS will run a lot faster on this than it does on Pandora - quad core with hardfp? Oh my.

D.
So SpecBAS/PandaBAS is highly parallel BASIC implementation with a lot of floating point argument passing?
I wouldn't say highly parallel. In order to mimic the original hardware, SpecBAS runs with two threads (minimum) - one for the display which updates at 50fps and one which runs the interpreter. On the Pandora (and the original Pi) the display takes, during normal operation, about 2% of CPU time to get the job done - depending on how many windows are open, of course. Add sprites and it doesn't take long before it's eating significant amounts of CPU time which in turn on a single core machine is subtracted from time available for the interpreter to do its job.

I've minimised the impact somewhat with previous discussions with you, with new subdivided rectangles, dirty flagging of regions etc and it's smooth enough at the moment. As I said, as sprites have to be displayed every frame, they slow things down a lot when you get a large number of them. The interpreter also performs lots of optimisations on the BASIC code - caching values/expression results, expression re-ordering, merging of common "opcodes" into specialist code etc.

There's also sound and music which also run in their own threads.

As for floating point passing, I don't do any in my code but the compiler (FPC) does for things like maths and trig etc. There's nothing I can do about that. As a result, the Pi clocked lower than my Pandora runs PandaBAS much, much faster - sometimes up to 50% faster depending on what the user's doing in the BASIC code.

I don't claim to be a competent coder, and I'm sure that I could have done things better than I did... But I've enjoyed coding it and love playing with the result. It's fast enough on the Pandora that all the old tasks I used to do on the Spectrum 48k are way faster than I ever dreamed they could be, but more speed is well.... better.

D.
 
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