anyone else looking forward to Raspberry Pi?

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stormy1

[H]ard|Gawd
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These little boards are really interesting.
I am planning on getting several and using them for terminals for virtual machine front ends for my home office computers.
I plan on running several win7 virtual machines on my server and replace several 100w+ systems with 5w systems and my server.
This will allow me to have even more of them in different places.

I cant wait for the B version to be available in quantity.
 
For $25, yes I am!
Would be a really good system for testing.
 
Yeah, planing on buy at lest two if not more, going to test out the XBMC ARM port and and a few other projects. :D
 
Poplap said:
Yeah, planing on buy at lest two if not more, going to test out the XBMC ARM port and and a few other projects. :D
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I would be awesome if XBMC ran well on them.
I would buy a couple more if it did.
 
stormy1 said:
I would be awesome if XBMC ran well on them.
I would buy a couple more if it did.
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ya thats what im hoping and planning on testing. its supposed to have a better GPU then whats in the ATV and xbmc runs on there, lets just hope the CPU is not to underpowered. but if it is, there is always the beagleboard-Mx or the pandaboard.
 
I can't wait for them to come out so I can finally get some arm love on something other then my phone :p :D :cool:
 
There's a couple of threads around here about it. It looks very cool. I'll buy one and I don't even know what I'd use it for!

Maybe a Puppy Linux distro for emulation or something.

Maybe set it up as a dedicated Commodore 64 emulator for the wife (she loved her commodore but never gets around to launching emulators / setting it up / etc). I can see a use for them as singular dedicated devices at the low prices - one for SNES, one for NES, etc. :D Just plug in the whole distro is prepped and ready to go!
 
GreenMonkey said:
There's a couple of threads around here about it. It looks very cool. I'll buy one and I don't even know what I'd use it for!

Maybe a Puppy Linux distro for emulation or something.

Maybe set it up as a dedicated Commodore 64 emulator for the wife (she loved her commodore but never gets around to launching emulators / setting it up / etc). I can see a use for them as singular dedicated devices at the low prices - one for SNES, one for NES, etc. :D Just plug in the whole distro is prepped and ready to go!
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now thats an idea... they would have to support Gpu acceleration as the cpu would not be good enough for that.
 
Poplap said:
now thats an idea... they would have to support Gpu acceleration as the cpu would not be good enough for that.
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You could run SNES and NES emulation on a K6-2 350mhz (maybe not bsnes, but at least snes9x / zsnes). The Pi should handle that kind of stuff just fine. Ditto for the commodore 64. I think you're overestimating how much CPU power it takes to emulate old systems.
 
Poplap said:
now thats an idea... they would have to support Gpu acceleration as the cpu would not be good enough for that.
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Yes, the CPU could easily handle emulation. There is almost no work within the GPU on that front, and even if so, a graphics processor from the mid-90's was able to handle it easily, so I'm sure a modern GPU/IGP will be able to take care of that functionality. ;)
 
GreenMonkey said:
You could run SNES and NES emulation on a K6-2 350mhz (maybe not bsnes, but at least snes9x / zsnes). The Pi should handle that kind of stuff just fine. Ditto for the commodore 64. I think you're overestimating how much CPU power it takes to emulate old systems.
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Sorry i was referring to more modern console emulators, ya those systems would be easy for it but things a little newer it would need to start supporting OpenGL.

I think it would be a cool idea to build a GUI that launches game ROMs/ISOs in emulators, kinda like a universal game console, although i dont think the Pi would have the power needed for most of them. :rolleyes:
 
I popped into this subforum to see if there was a thread about this and I came away happy. I would love to use one of these with my x-arcade stick to set up a plug-and-play arcade system. It's nice that so many TV's have USB ports on them now. :D

I did a few minutes of googling and couldn't find anybody claiming to have a case ready for production, but lots of people talking about using the rasberryPi as a the brains of a MAME box or HTPC.
 
Thing with most of the emulators is they probably make alot of use of x86 assembly code. There has been alot of development on ARM though thanks to smartphones and tablets so the code base is expanding continually. As for running Windows, I don't think that is the intent, 256MB is not going to make much of a platform for a full GUI desktop even with Linux. Even if you could squeeze it in, it just wouldn't be useful IMHO. Things like HTPC and dedicated emulation appliances are very interesting though.
 
dustNbone said:
Things like HTPC and dedicated emulation appliances are very interesting though.
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I agree. It's a fantasic deal for $25 and should handle specific tasks very well. It's just not useful enough as a general computing platform though.

I'll buy the next revision if it comes with an upgraded processor and more memory. I don't care if the price goes higher than $25/$35. An A8 or A9 core based processor with dedicated video memory and 512MB RAM would be great, even if the price bumps up to $40/$50, which is entirely possible in that budget.

The ARM11 core isn't horrible, but it just doesn't handle certain tasks very well. And the GPU in the RPi (BCM2835 w/VideoCore IV) is held back by lack of on-board video memory like its big brother the BCM2763 (similar to BCM2835, but with 128MB DDR2 video memory on package and very decent GPU performance). The video decoding hardware is the hero of the RPi. It was a very price sensitive design, so the compromise is understandable.
 
dustNbone said:
Thing with most of the emulators is they probably make alot of use of x86 assembly code. There has been alot of development on ARM though thanks to smartphones and tablets so the code base is expanding continually. As for running Windows, I don't think that is the intent, 256MB is not going to make much of a platform for a full GUI desktop even with Linux. Even if you could squeeze it in, it just wouldn't be useful IMHO. Things like HTPC and dedicated emulation appliances are very interesting though.
Click to expand...

It will make a great CLI system though, especially for SSH and terminal-based management, especially on a budget and small footprint.
 
jatwell said:
Any local storage on it?
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There is no onboard flash, the thing boots off a SD card. This is a mixed blessing, on the one hand it means you can swap out the entire OS simply by swapping the SD card with no worries about leaving some part behind. On the other hand SD cards are PAINFULLY slow at random writes.

There is also USB which is probably your best bet if you want faster storage.
 
I'm wondering what kind of performance to actually expect from the USB and SD interfaces. You're really not going to be slinging a ton of data around with it anyway mind you. As a boot device I'd think SD would be ample. I'm thinking just to have more "boxes" available in general, $30 or 40 for a dedicated usenet binary grabber and processor would be awesome. It need not be super fast, just keeping up to my internet connection. Can't beat the footprint.
 
I run a beagleboard XM (a device that is fairly similar to the pi but with a few more features and a much higher pricetag) with the root filesystem on a SD card (supposedly speed grade 6) and I can tell you that anything that involves lots of random writes (e.g. instaling/updating packages) is excruciatingly slow.
 
Well thats to be expected, after all most of these ARM based boards are Dev boards and there for the easy change up with SD cards makes it easy to move from one version to another.

We also have to remember that the Pi is meant for teaching embedded systems and there for meant for things to change a lot.
 
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