Raspberry Pi Becomes Third Best-Selling General Purpose Computer of All Time, Beating Commodore 64 (raspberrypi.org) 145
The Raspberry Pi has outsold the Commodore 64 by selling north of 12.5 million boards in five years, becoming the world's third best-selling general purpose computer. "The Commodore 64, had, until recently, the distinction of being the third most popular general purpose computing platform," Eben Upton told a crowd at the fifth birthday party. "That's what I'm here to celebrate," he said, "we are now the third most popular general purpose computing platform after the Mac and PC." The MagPi Magazine reports: The Raspberry Pi Model 3 is the best-selling Raspberry Pi. This chart shows that Raspberry Pi 3 has accounted for almost a third of all Raspberry Pi boards sold. The Model 3 sits next to its immediate predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 2B+ (which has the same board shape but a slightly slower CPU). These two boards account for over half of all Raspberry Pi boards sold. The rest of the sales are between older models. The original Model A accounts for just 2 percent of sales. So keep one if you've got it as they're pretty rare. We should point out, before the Commodore fan club arrives, that there are discrepancies in the total number of sales of the C64. The 12.5 million figure comes from an analysis of serial numbers. This article by Michael Steil explains in detail why the 12.5 million number is accurate. We hold it to be the most accurate analysis of Commodore 64 sales (other opinions are available).
Beating Commodore 64!!?! (Score:1)
Say it ain't so!!
Re:Beating Commodore 64!!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
These numbers are crazy. They're probably counting sales and not use.
Surely, most Pi's are just used as cheap C64 emulation machines, letting the C64 continue to reign supreme. (Those not being used as a replacement C64 are all obviously just collecting dust in a drawer.)
Re:Beating Commodore 64!!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I get the joke, but mine is a very effective headless, X-less torrent client and media server. It streams internet radio into the home stereo, and without the buffering issues that Windows machines seem to have. I can add a Linux ISO to the torrent queue and forget about it until I actually want to try it out.
Both of which could be handled by an old laptop running Windows or Debian, of course, but not for the price and energy consumption of the Pi.
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They're probably counting sales and not use.
I can confirm. I have:
* 3x Raspberry Pi 1 Model B
* 1x Raspberry Pi 1 Model A+
* 1x Raspberry Pi 2
* 2x Raspberry Pi 3
* 2x Raspberry Pi Zero
Out of these 10, I am using 2. I have one in an actual project and one running as a server because I had an extra static IP and couldn't think of anything useful to do with it.
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So that just confirms that 9 of them were sold to a tinkere without a plan, nothing more.
Personally I have 2 Pi 2s and 1 Pi 3. All in active use.
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I don't think my case is all that unusual. I think there are a lot of Pi's collecting dust these days.
The audio output left a lot to be desired, and the codec hats were rather pricey. So that killed off one of the projects I had in mind.
The 3x Pi1's were for a Plan 9 cluster. But the buggy usb support on Plan 9 kept taking out the whole system and I was too busy with my day job to do more than hack a way around it. The results were not great and I was never able to move from Plan 9 to Inferno (which was the
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Do you have anything to base that wild assumption on, apart from the phrase "Best-Selling" in the headline?
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It ain't so.
They're mixing the different Raspberry Pi models together as one thing, and then counting all the 80386 or 8052 computers as different. It may even be that it is such apples/oranges that it is impossible to do an honest "head to head" type comparison, considering those types of differences in what is being measured. It may be that they would have to count all the "Intel Pentium" computers as one to count all the Raspberry Pi computers as the same, or maybe everything that Gateway or Dell ever so
Re: No comparison to the C64 (Score:1)
And the C64 cost $595 (equivalent to $1495 in today's dollars). They aren't comparable.
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Except you could fit the entire C64 in a TQFP package [wikipedia.org] these days - except perhaps the floppy drive - and crank it out for a few cents a pop.
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You can get an old 8052 processor if you want to build something similar, but if you want something in a small surface mount package the cheapest is actually going to be a 32 bit ARM, with a few 8 bit AVR and PIC micros close behind. But expect to pay over a dollar if you want 64K RAM, not a few cents.
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They're building a very nice FPGA accelerator for the Commodore Amiga system. Basically building a very fast version of a Motorola 68060 for less than the price of an old Motorola chip if you could even find one. It also does a lot of very neat things to speed up all phases of the Amiga. I never would have believed such a thing was possible 20 years ago.
http://www.apollo-accelerators... [apollo-accelerators.com]
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I have got an Atari style joystick which has a TV out and contains an entire Commodore 64 and several games for it.
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I bought my first C64 in 1984 for $199 with the C1541 5.25" floppy disk drive for another $199 at the BX on Keesler AFB. I still have them and they still work. I just hooked it up to a TV the other day to look for some text files I had on a disk. My 1084 monitor died unfortunately and finding one in my area has been impossible. I've also got 16 Raspberry Pi boards. 2 original B, 2 of the B2 boards, 4 A+ boards, 4 Rpi B3 boards, 2 pi zero boards and now 2 pi zeroW boards. I've got about half of them in
ZoomFloppy for USB C64 floppy drive (Score:2)
http://store.go4retro.com/zoom... [go4retro.com]
I bought one of those, but I'm having trouble getting a disk drive so I can pull data off old diskettes while I still can... Lucky you to still have one that works!
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I've got 3. And a C1581 3.5" drive for it as well. I need to ebay this stuff. I don't need 3 C64 systems. I would like a nice 1084S though.
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Yeah, it would be counting every Audi A4 ever made and proclaiming that it's the best selling car ever because the combined total was more than the 2013 Honda Accord. Not really.
Which computer is in first place? (Score:1)
If the Raspberry Pi is the second most popular computer (dubious claim considering that there are several models of it), and the Commodore 64 is the third most popular computer, what is considered to be the most popular computer of all time? My hunch would be the Apple II, but I wouldn't be surprised if iMac was on the top 5 list.
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You do know that Mic4rosoft wrote the Commodore 64 Basic?
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This isn't even good trolling.
Is it a "General Purpose Computer"? (Score:4, Informative)
It seems like a bit of a stretch to call it that. There are the basic features I would consider a "General Purpose" computer to have (and, to be fair, the Raspberry Pi has many of them):
- Wall (or POE) Power Supply
- SSD/HHD (the SD Card of the Raspberry Pi could probably be considered that)
- USB Ports for Keyboard/Mouse (Raspberry Pi has that)
- Video Output (Raspberry Pi has that)
- Network Connection (Raspberry Pi has that)
- Ready to use OS (I guess Raspberry Pi could be considered to have that with Raspbian)
More philosophically, I would consider a General Purpose computer to be one that you take out of the box, plug in and turn on - the Raspberry Pi really doesn't fit that use case which makes it hard for me to consider it a "General Purpose" computer.
I would consider it to be a very successful "Custom Purpose" computer, however.
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Excuse me, who's definition of "computer" are you using? Because none of those are requirements for a device to be called a general purpose computer.
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Come on now, get with the program. This is how the game is played these days. Carefully craft a metric that puts you at the top of the heap.
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Open firmware (Score:5, Interesting)
Open firmware: https://github.com/christinaa/... [github.com]
Coders wanted. Linux bring-up is done, needs USB and display to be more useful. Discussion happens on Freenode IRC #raspberrypi-internals
When this popular embedded platform has a fully functional open firmware to use instead of the proprietary bootcode.bin then I'll be a little more cheery about the success of the Raspberry Pi worldwide.
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It's not ideal but it's still 1000x better and more trustworthy than Intel it AMD systems with their built in rootkits.
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I don't see how you can call it custom purpose but not general purpose.
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I call the Raspberry Pi "Custom Purpose" simply because if you look at 90%+ of the advertised uses for it, they are just that, controlling machinery, kiosks, etc.
Just look here: http://makezine.com/2013/04/14... [makezine.com]
Now, see how many of these types of projects your basic Dell system unit is used in.
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Well, I kinda disagree with your definitions but I see where you're coming from.
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According to my definition of refrigerators, the Raspberry Pi is one. The thing with definitions is you cannot just make them up.
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Okay, where is the accepted definition of "General Purpose Computer"?
In response to the term "General Purpose Computer" used in TFA, I used what I would consider a definition and compare the Raspberry Pi to it to decide whether or not it fit the definition.
If I ask Google "general purpose computer definition" I get 8.17 million results - if you read them, you'll see answers that include devices ranging from mainframes to smartphones to single board computers (and, I imagine, if I were to go far enough, I'd
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Well most of your 8.17 million results probably agree on what these things are: computers that you can you use for many purposes. As opposed to computers you can only use for a specific purpose, like cars, washing machines, gaming consoles, dumbphones and toothbrushes.
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Rpi is missing one of the most important features for a general purpose computer:
- Non-DIY hardware switch to initiate software shutdown / safe unmount of SD card (it's really not convenient to attach a network cable so you can ssh in and do sudo shutdown -h now every time you're going to move it).
- USB core that doesn't have a critical hardware flaw that was known in model 1A but wasn't fixed in the model B or B+, and still hasn't been fixed years later in the model 2 or 3 (aka I hope you're not depending
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Re:Is it a "General Purpose Computer"? (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes.
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More philosophically, I would consider a General Purpose computer to be one that you take out of the box, plug in and turn on - the Raspberry Pi really doesn't fit that use case which makes it hard for me to consider it a "General Purpose" computer.
Why doesn't it fit that use case? You can buy it at the shops complete with wall power and memory card pre-loaded with a running OS.
Just attach a screen keyboard and mouse and plug it in and turn it on.
It's no less of a general purpose computer than any other. Actually it's more so because it takes far less time and effort to get Raspberian started on a freshly bought raspberry pi than Windows 10 on a freshly bought PC.
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You can order one with the OS already installed on the SD card. Take it out of the box, plug in keyboard, mouse, hdmi cable, ethernet cable or use wifi and plug in the power. It's up and running in seconds.
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If you buy a bare Pi you have a bit of work to do to have a complete general purpose computer. That's appropriate because many of them are sold for embedded systems rather than to be used that way. But people are more computer savvy now and most don't find it a challenge to gather the other parts; if you want something simpler you can buy a complete kit that has it all (Pi board, case, NOOBS card, power supply) in the package. Still a touch of assembly required: you have to put the NOOBS card in the board a
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Really. An 8 bit CPU clocked at 1 megahertz with 64 Kilobytes of RAM of which only 38,911 bytes were free for use by the user. Booted to a command line Basic Interpreter. I fucking loved mine, I still have it and boot it a couple of times a year. Computers are far more useful now but not nearly as much fun. That's what the Raspberry Pi does, it brings the fun back.
Well, not really comparable... (Score:2)
...Commodore 64 came complete with a keyboard, power supply and RF modulator / Video out/Audio out - and ready to use.
And it was sold at a much higher price point, plus it wasn't really a dev-kit like the PI is. The PI is cute, but it's on the level with Arduino (faster of course), and other similar "devboards". So, if we're there - I can imagine there's a lot more sold Arduino Nano V3 Chinese clones sold than all the PI's in the world.
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Ok you need a keyboard/mouse and power supply but the Pi does give you HDMI ( the present day equivalent of RF/vid/audio).
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With the power supply its getting to the stage where many people already have one: any old phone charger will do.
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With the power supply its getting to the stage where many people already have one: any old phone charger will do.
No, it really won't. If it's a halfway decent phone charger it will do, but the Pi is very picky about its power input. That's just one of the many things that make it a not very good embedded board. You'll often need an additional power supply even if you've already got one. The fact that the USB is still crap is another one.
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No, it really won't. If it's a halfway decent phone charger it will do, but the Pi is very picky about its power input. That's just one of the many things that make it a not very good embedded board.
Those are rather unrelated: for an embedded board you get to choose the PSU as well, so you can just spec out a decent one. That's what I did when I used it embedded.
I've just got another one (the previous one I used for embedded stuff so I picked a PSU which works fine). I'm going to try it on all my phone char
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The PI is cute, but it's on the level with Arduino (faster of course), and other similar "devboards".
No. It is not on the same level with Arduino, it belongs to a much higher level. Arduino is down with STM and PIC, Pi is up with embedded PCs. Before the rise of ARM and the rash of things like Pi we had actual PC-compatible machines in small form factors like PC/104. They were dramatically more expensive, of course, because technology hadn't shrunk everything cheaply yet.
Whoa! (Score:1)
Best selling (Score:3)
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100% pure BULL SHIT (Score:3, Informative)
Also c64 sold 12-30 million units. Creative misuse of numbers on the RPi part.
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The C65 was totally different. Not that it matters as there were only a few made.
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Even so it's just more indication that RPi is full of bullshit. Now they're lumping way too many models from way too many companies over 35 years as a single "computer" because taking each product line individually would probably knock RPi off the top 100 list.
If they want to do the math that way, how dare they not take all the commodore machines together as well putting the total several times higher than RPi.
Not to mention they're
Ok but... (Score:3)
how many C64 do you need to hook up in parralell to get the power of one Pi?
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C64 was released in 1982. 1982's Cray supercomputer could do 420 million FLOPs.
Raspberry Pi's GPU can do 24 GFLOPs. That's equivalent to 57 of 1982's Cray supercomputers.
http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second lists the C64's MOS Technology 6510 @ 1 MHz as having 0.43 MIPS and 0 MFLOPS.
Note that the 6510 is an 8-bit CPU, so it would take a ton of instructions to do 32-bit IEEE floating point in software on it.
I don't know the 6510 instruction set, but it's clear that to simulate a 32-bit fused-
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MOS Technology 6502: 0.500 MIPS at 1 MHz versus CPU: 4× ARM Cortex-A53: 2458.1 MIPS at 1.2 GHz
That's what? Almost 5000 times faster? Of course once you start figuring in all the other improvements besides CPU it's really worse than that. People that wanted speed on the C64 learned assembler and they also learned to bang the hardware directly. By the 90s there were some of the Eastern European guys that had been using the 64 for 10 years that could do things the original designers of the C64 couldn
Commodore 64 was a single model (Score:2)
Why not add in the Vic 20, and the 128.
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news flash (Score:1)
This is absurdly incorrect on its face (Score:5, Insightful)
Combining all computers that are branded Raspberry Pi and saying they have sold more units combined than the Commodore 64 is one thing, but saying "The Pi has beaten the C64 as the most units of a single computer sold" is an outright lie. The Pi series is also not a computer made for general-purpose use; it's an embedded system, and by that standard I'm willing to bet that there's some model of wireless router that has sold more units than the C64; perhaps the venerable Linksys WRT54G?
tl;dr: the C64 still holds the crown. The article is based on bullshit logic.
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You are mostly correct, with the one exception that the Raspberry Pi is an embedded system. Embedded systems don't come with HDMI output, 3d graphics acceleration, WiFi, Bluetooth, a NIC, four USB ports, audio out, and have both a choice of NOOBs, Debian, and Fedora (workstation, with Gnome 3!) as operating systems.
I'm not going to claim it is performance driven, or that all of it's distros are as functional as the venerable as other better powered systems, but it is hardly in the same class of embedded sy
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Embedded systems don't come with HDMI output, 3d graphics acceleration, WiFi, Bluetooth, a NIC, four USB ports, audio out, and have both a choice of NOOBs, Debian, and Fedora (workstation, with Gnome 3!) as operating systems.
Embedded systems can have any or all of those characteristics. They are simply designed to be embedded in another device, and not stand alone with their own case and power supply. An automotive infotainment system is an embedded computer. And they typically have 3d acceleration today, they certainly have networking, they usually have USB, they obviously have audio out... Or the computerized displays tucked into some otherwise-mechanical slot machines, those are embedded systems, but they're complete compute
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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The Linksys WRT54G has the same problem as the Raspberry Pi, in the sense that different revisions run very different hardware and not all revisions are compatible with each other. Which of course is confusing as hell since Linksys links to reuse the same model number over and over for some reason.
Though I would argue that the Pi is a general purpose computer. Sure, many of them end up embedded in some application, but I've seen the same thing done to standard off-the-shelf desktop machines running the re
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Commodore never upgraded the C64. Expansions like an REU were made for it, but those w
Apples and Oranges. (Score:2, Informative)
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Similarities (Score:2)
C64/RPi Similarities:
1. Both are computers.
2. Both are currently gathering dust in people's cupboards.
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