Not Everyone Is Excited About The Raspberry Pi 3

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Not Everyone Is Excited About The Raspberry Pi 3

While the Raspberry Pi 3 should be much more powerful than its predecessors thanks to finally having a ARMv8 processor (and quad-core Cortex-A53 at that), it's not for everyone...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-3-Doubts

[bug77]

There could be some value in Raspbian, I don't know. But hey, choices never hurt (unless you're clueless).

[erendorn]

Different boards, different usages. For example, there aren't that many boards with a camera connector, and correctly supported cameras.

[L_A_G]

Competing single board machines like the ODroid doing more for less money? What else is new?

Seriously thou, you buy the rPi ether for the support and community around it or because you don't know any better. It's been this way for years and I really can't see it changing any time soon. Apart from the ODroid series, most competitors to the rPi just come and go so the community reason is a perfectly valid one if you ask me.

[Palu Macil]

The PINE board isn't $15 since shipping doubles the price, but really it's fine to say that the prices are all similar. However, one important point not mentioned it that Mali is not totally open. It's more open than some, but only the Raspberry Pi has an ARM GPU that's 100% open. That's not actually important to me, but it's very important to a certain part of the community. I agree with L_A_G on stability and community. I only use Rpi and Arduino for projects for that reason. Additionally, a gig of RAM is plenty for anything where you don't need graphics, and the only time you need graphics is for a touchscreen interface. You don't need this as a desktop. As a desktop, the competitors are toys as well.

[Iridium]

Fair enough, but ... let's say I want to write some custom code and I need to access, the GPU, do ARM MALI or PowerVR let me do it? With VC4 I can do it, even just for fun or for learning. no one says it's a nice experience, but I can do it if I want. which bring us to the real question: What do the others learned in these years since Broadcom released the complete VC 4 doc sets?

[bokal]

I buy one for the community and "ecosystem".
Also because it's powered through USB unlike the O-Droid, has an audio jack, and has a GPU with an opensource driver and open specs.

Hopefully, the next one will have Gigabit Ethernet.

[blackout23]

I'd buy the ODROID C2 for the black PCB alone.

[doragasu]

I thought that way in the past, while we had only the first RPi (in its two flavors): Why pay $45 when I can pay less for a more powerful Allwinner A10 board, equipped also with more peripherals?

But then you buy one of these cheaper boards and discover that you lack the graphics driver so graphics and/or video decoding performance is poorer than in the RPi. Or find that the kernel lacks sources, so you can only use the kernel version shipped with the board. Or kernel sources are available, but there are some binary blobs that again prevent you from using a version different than the one shipped with the board. And using an old kernel version can cause all kind of problems (specially if like me you want to run a systemd based distro like ArchLinux).

Maybe this has changed since then, but I suppose it has not, so if you want to avoid problems and save time, just buy the Pi.

BTW, there is only one thing that really pisses me off about the RPi: the poor Ethernet performance (due to the USB to Ethernet chip used). This is a shame for RPi and RPi2, and I think the RPi3 also uses one of these chips...

I would have been a lot more excited if instead of going for a more powerful SoC, they would have implemented a proper Ethernet connection.

[pal666]

lol, the author did buy one rpi3 in the end, so this fact alone is telling
btw, i already have a desktop, but i need many devices to connect sensors. and sensors do not need gigabit ethernet, they need any ethernet. and one gig of memory is enough for this. poe would be nice though.
also, armv8 is very much welcome not because of speed improvements, but because of shared system/install image with all modern arms. much better to have to deal only with fedora aarch64