Raspberry Pi Upgrades Compute Module With 10 Times the CPU Performance (arstechnica.com) 71
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is getting a big upgrade, with the same processor used in the recently released Raspberry Pi 3. The Compute Module, which is intended for industrial applications, was first released in April 2014 with the same CPU as the first-generation Raspberry Pi. The upgrade announced today has 1GB of RAM and a Broadcom BCM2837 processor that can run at up to 1.2GHz. "This means it provides twice the RAM and roughly ten times the CPU performance of the original Compute Module," the Raspberry Pi Foundation announcement said. This is the second major version of the Compute Module, but it's being called the "Compute Module 3" to match the last flagship Pi's version number. The new Compute Module has more flexible storage options than the original. "One issue with the [Compute Module 1] was the fixed 4GB of eMMC flash storage," the announcement said. But some users wanted to add their own flash storage. "To solve this, two versions of the [Compute Module 3] are being released: one with 4GB eMMC on-board and a 'Lite' model which requires the user to add their own SD card socket or eMMC flash." The core module is tiny so that it can fit into other hardware, but for development purposes there is a separate I/O board with GPIO, USB and MicroUSB, CSI and DSI ports for camera and display boards, HDMI, and MicroSD. The Compute Module 3 and the lite version cost $30 and $25, respectively.
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Re:But it's not a murkan (Score:5, Informative)
ARM was British [wikipedia.org], now Japanese [wikipedia.org].
Re:But it's not a murkan (Score:4, Informative)
The chips the Broadcom originally based the RaspberryPi from were designed in Cambridge, England.
Re: Nintendo EMU (Score:1)
Raspberry Pi one can easily emulate Nintendo. I have Emulation Station/RetroPie running on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it runs NES, SNES, SEGA all fine. Even works for some N64 games pretty well.
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Raspberry Pi one can easily emulate Nintendo. I have Emulation Station/RetroPie running on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it runs NES, SNES, SEGA all fine. Even works for some N64 games pretty well.
Hell, I've had a Raspberry Pi one emulate a frickin' IBM System/370 mainframe.
And it probably runs faster than the original did!
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Re: Nintendo EMU (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a torrent for a 128GB sd image that has damn near every game ever made for NES, SNES and a bunch of other old consoles on it. I downloaded it and after writing it to a card I booted and was playing games a few minutes later. It's so easy it's almost stupid. Rpi3 is great until you get to N64 and dreamcast stuff. That's asking a little too much although some of the N64 games seem playable. Earlier than N64 and it's no problem at all. Haven't tried overclocking it yet.
Re: Nintendo EMU (Score:4, Informative)
They can be overclocked. The Raspberry Pi 3 has a newer ARMv8 SoC which runs a bit hotter than the previous SoCs they have used.
I'm going through this process at the moment; I have a Pi3 in the official Pi case running Lakka (an OpenELEC distro with RetroArch on top of it, designed exclusively for emulating a fair number of classic systems).
Like other people, I've found the Pi3 is perfect for emulating 8-bit, 16-bit, and some 32-bit consoles, but struggles a bit with some - Atari Jaguar and Sega Saturn seem to be way too slow to use, while N64 is just a bit too slow. PS1 emulation works pretty well, but gets choppy in some places.
I want to overclock my Pi3, so I have bought and fitted some heatsinks (one to the SoC and one to the USB hub/Ethernet controller chip). I have drilled ventilation holes in the underside of the case to allow cool air to get in to the RAM chip, which sits on the underside of the board. I have drilled ventilation holes in the lid of the case, along with holes to allow me to fit a 30mm 5v cooling fan. Then I fitted such a fan, and found it to be the loudest, whiniest, most irritating sound in the world. So I threw it away and have ordered a 40mm 5v fan from a company who specialize in making silent PCs instead.
Re: Nintendo EMU (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, forgot to mention - Lakka includes plug-and-play drivers for various game console controllers. I use my PlayStation 3 DualShock controller with it; absolutely zero setup required. You need to connect it up wired at least once, but then you can configure it to use the controller wirelessly (Pi3 has built in WiFi and Bluetooth, but older Pi units would need to have USB dongles to replicate the same functionality).
Lakka can also use ROMs and BIN/CUE files that have been shared from a NAS, but it does require a teeny little bit of command line usage to do.
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I'm up to a 1.5 ratio on it now. Not going much past 2 to 1 so you better get after it.
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The pie 3b about an hour and a half or 15 minutes the second time to stick the pie in a case w/heatsink plug into hdmi and peripherals write the retropie image to an sd card boot the thing up and configure it.... (it's mostly configured just out of the package not including getting roms copied to it) it does all of the nintendos up to n64 very well along with the older stuff atari, mame, celecovision, etc... (if you have a lot of roms you may also want to look into sselp/scraper on git hub)
if you have troub
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Depends on how accurate you want it to be. If it's very close to accurate, it'll take several more generations.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/... [arstechnica.com]
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And Retropie still doesn't use higan - mostly forks of Snes9x, which is not accurate at all.
The future is now if you're buying a commodity PC, not a low-powered ARM CPU.
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So how long does it really take to get a raspberry PI up to emulating a nintendo and is it as nice to work with?
It took me about 6 hours.
That was:
- about 5 minutes to download retropie
- about 2 minutes to write the image to an SD card
- about 5 minutes to do first boot and get the pi on my wifi
- about 1 hour to download the full tosec ROM packs for NES, snes, sms, gbc, gba, atari (2600+7800), and tg16
- about 4 hours to convince Windows to ungzip the individually gzip'ed ROM files using 7zip on the command line and delete the archives, while sorting out only ROMs with a "[!]" marker in the file name (aka "known good an
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I haven't tried Retropie, I use Lakka (which runs on OpenELEC and runs Retroarch as the UI) and the Pi3 boots to UI in under 10 seconds from cold.
4FB Flash? (Score:2)
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I'd say 16GB is the sweet spot. Those cards cost almost nothing now. I store most stuff on USB flash drives now or just stream over the network. The PI2 and 3 are fast enough to be useful. I now have the older original Pi boards retired to security camera duty.
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Oh great! 4, 64 and 16gb are all sweet spots? Any more? I love opinions!
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640K was never enough. Not even when that quote was made.
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It's a moving target as the price on storage tumbles.
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4GB is 20 copies of Red Hat Linux (Score:2)
Red Hat Linux and CentOS require at least 200MB of disk space. The smaller Pi option has 20 times that. It can hold 20 separate installations of Linux. Often, that's enough. When it's not, use an SD card.
Looking at it another way, for some projects I choose between an Arduino and a Pi. If it's too big for the Arduino, I use a Pi. Some projects are borderline, things that *could* be done with an Arduino, but it would be a stretch. The Arduino 32K-256K of storage. So the Pi has several thousand times a
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This is for embedded use, mostly - and it's soldered on. Even the summary says they're now offering the choice of expandable storage.
Re:4FB Flash? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a hobbyist board. It's okay to use as a computer but really I can pick up old junk 10 year old laptops at garage sales for 25 bucks that'll run rings around it. I have one set up with a desktop just to play around and it's maybe a slow P3 speed. It runs the raspbian pixel desktop pretty snappy though if you don't push too hard. I've had it choke a few times on too many open programs. It's amazing for what it is.
Re:4FB Flash? (Score:4, Interesting)
and it's maybe a slow P3 speed.
That sounds fishy, though. Even though the 1+ GHz A53 cores could be substantially worse per-clock than the P3 - I doubt that, though -, there's still four of them. The average total performance should be quite a bit higher.
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Try doing work on it. The graphics are pretty fast but using pypar2 on it or any type of compression software and it starts to lug pretty hard.
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That all depends on what work you were doing. If your work was too hard for an old P3 then yes it would start to lug. If on the other hand computers didn't become useful only with the release of the i7 then you'll find a RPi 3 can beat any old P3 in most tasks, including computing checksums if that is your thing.
For most people that is not their thing.
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You might be right but not by much. The Pi3 is 2441 MIPS vs Pentium III 600mhz at 2054 MIPS. The Pi3 is clocked at 1200mhz with 4 cores so it's an interesting comparison. The last Pentium III I had was 1ghz and it really seemed faster than the Pi3 but that's been so long I can't say for sure. It was an IBM thinkpad and I just tossed it about a year ago even though the damn thing still worked. You've made me curious so I'm going to see what I've got I can compare it to and run some tests like ripping mp
Sill only usb bus for storage, networking, etc? (Score:2)
Sill only usb bus for storage, networking, etc?
Re:Sill only usb bus for storage, networking, etc? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. It's a hobbyist board not a workhorse. Considering it's limitations it's amazing what people are doing with them. It's bringing the creativeness out in people.
Uses? (Score:4, Interesting)
The article shows a picture of it being used in the back of an NEC monitor.
Are there any other examples of industrial controls or places that these live?
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People have made media players / set top boxes out of them. I believe it has the same exact foot print as the last one, and they say they will stick to it into the future, so you can make a devices where you can 'upgrade' it.
This seems to be targeted at people making mid-size production runs of products, probably in the range of 100's or 1000's that aren't big enough to bother with designing custom board, but might need a few custom things on its own mother board.
Re:Uses? (Score:4, Informative)
The company I work for uses a similar device in a tablet computer (really more of a brick computer, but anyway)... At the time it was developed the Pi Compute didn't exist, which is unfortunately because they one we have turned out to be a pain in the arse.
They are likely to be used in a lot of industrial applications where the designer doesn't want to build and support their own ARM system and software environment, they just want something they can plug in and run an OS on out of the box, with a few peripherals of their own.
Beowulf (Score:2)
But can you run a Beowulf cluster on it?
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yes you can build a beowulf cluster of it. It was done on previous generation of r-pi.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/b... [zdnet.com]
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Better than a cable box (Score:2)
These are still better specs than your average, slow as molasses cable box.
Lite Model and "soldering gurus" (Score:2)
I'm waiting for the "soldering gurus" who were screaming why the original RPi was not sold cheaper in component kit form to get the Lite model and solder their eMMCs on those empry BGA pads.
I remember all the boasting about them reflowing huge multilayer PCBs in their kitchen oven.
I guess I'll have to wait for Pi4 (Score:1)
Sigh it can only decode 1080p H.264/MPEG-4 at 30fps?
I guess I'll have to wait for at least another generation before I get my mythtv client.