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Hardware

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Launched (raspberrypi.org) 164

New submitter stikves writes: The Raspberry foundation has launched an incremental update to the Raspberry Pi 3 model B: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ . In addition to slight increase (200MHz) in CPU speed, and upgraded networking (802.11ac and Gigabit, albeit over USB2), one big advantage is the better thermal management which allows sustained performance over longer load periods. Further reading: TechRepublic, and Linux Journal.
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Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Launched

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  • by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @10:38AM (#56259323)
    Am I the only one that still uses the original Raspberry Pi? CPU speed has never been the selling point of em to me.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      If the price is the same, would you pick up the original version or the latest version? Probably not.

      You also probably missed the part about better manufacturing procedure resulting in more stability, resulting in faster clock. But then again 90% of the people write a comment after reading only the first 10% of the article.

    • People wanting to do small tinkering projects, or file servers, or whatever
      are probably all happy with the Raspberry 1 (I certainly am).

      People wanting to do video processing (which was the initial target of this class of chips by Broadcom anyway) are probably happier with more Mhz giving more power to offload h264 (and partial h265) to the hardware.
      People using it as a retro gaming machine are also happier with more Mhz giving faster / more precise emulation.

      • by pjt33 ( 739471 )

        The B has more USB ports, and the 3B has built-in wifi. Not needing to attach hubs, hats, etc. is a reason for people whose projects require those to get a newer model.

    • by amiga3D ( 567632 )

      It depends on what you want to do. For a lot of projects the original pi is sufficient but not all improvements are speed related. I'd at least go with a 2B+ or a Pi Zero if I was worried about power constraints and didn't need a lot of CPU. I do still have 2 original Pi units in use as surveillance cams but have been thinking of replacing them with the zero W units.

    • Maybe you'll be dismissive of my use case... while I use a couple of them where speed certainly does not matter, I did put one in an arcade cabinet and more speed would have been pretty sweet. Even without overclocking, it could emulate most games up to around the turn of the millenium... more power could only improve that situation.

    • Am I the only one that still uses the original Raspberry Pi?

      A follow up question:

      Has anyone owned one that broke down . . . ?

      I've got three or the original B's, and all of them are going strong. If one breaks, I'll replace it. Otherwise the resources are fine for the things I use it for.

      • by sl3xd ( 111641 )

        The only thing that's ever "broken" on my original model B's are not technically the Pi: The external power supply, and the SD card.

        I've had a few original model B's running more or less continuously since they were first released. (I do reboot for kernel updates).

      • Am I the only one that still uses the original Raspberry Pi?

        A follow up question:

        Has anyone owned one that broke down . . . ?

        I've got three or the original B's, and all of them are going strong. If one breaks, I'll replace it. Otherwise the resources are fine for the things I use it for.

        My original pi will no longer boot :( but both my rpi2 and rpi3 are going strong! I was going to buy a couple W+ today but it's limit 1 and shipping is almost as much as the board so I'll wait a tad longer.

      • by G00F ( 241765 )

        I have a RP2 that's dying (hardware errors)

      • Am I the only one that still uses the original Raspberry Pi?

        A follow up question:

        Has anyone owned one that broke down . . . ?

        I've got three or the original B's, and all of them are going strong. If one breaks, I'll replace it. Otherwise the resources are fine for the things I use it for.

        I have a mix of Pi Zero, ZeroW, B+, 2, and 3. I have 9 in total and every one runs perfect. I have only ever replaced one flaky microSD card. I learned to never get the kits with the included microSD card.

      • I had a 3 that the WiFi died after about 3 hours.
        Frustrating!

    • My $99 SheevaPlug is still going strong.

      • I still have a pair of these - one's my offsite backup machine - and they still work well, although the single USB port is becoming a limiting factor.

      • by johnw ( 3725 )

        Although presumably you've had to replace the PSU after the magic smoke got out?

      • by pnutjam ( 523990 )
        I had about a dozen Alix 2d3 boards, but I'm down to one and one newer APU. I gave away or sold them, none broke. They are great for network stuff.
    • > Am I the only one that still uses the original Raspberry Pi?

      You are not the only one. But I also use 2's and 3's.

      Now I've got to wonder if I need bigger power supplies for the 3B+
      • by afidel ( 530433 )

        Max power use for the 3B+ should be roughly the same, constant power usage is ~100mA higher if you leave the WiFi and ethernet both enabled.

      • by sl3xd ( 111641 )

        Getting a bigger PSU is more a function on whether you hook up many external devices (HAT's, USB devices, etc.)

    • by sl3xd ( 111641 )

      Am I the only one that still uses the original Raspberry Pi?

      Nope, I still have five or six...

      Though the newer Raspberry Pi B+ models have an improved "hat" hardware interface. [raspberrypi.org] which wasn't as robust or standardized with the original Model B.

      CPU speed has never been the selling point of em to me.

      The improvements are far more than the SoC powering the Pi 2 & 3:

      The Pi 2&3 are also able to deliver more power to audio/video interfaces, to USB devices, and to attached Hat's. I don't have to worry about plugging in a USB device and the Pi going into an unusuable state due to the USB device drawing power.

      The Pi 2&3

    • Nope. Original Pi makes a sweet print server.

    • by nnull ( 1148259 )

      I'm still using the original Raspberry PI for various things. It works fine. Mind you, this is in an industrial setting too. I've been using them as HMI screens, information screens and a lot of other little things.

      They've been easy to manage and update. I haven't had any of them go out either, if they do, no problem as I just plug in a brand new beefier raspberry pi. The only thing I dislike about them is the power connector, but I've been able to resolve that with a soldering iron to make a better connect

  • Moar RAM! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @10:41AM (#56259343)

    I would be more satisfied with doubling the ram than the AC wireless.

    • The SD card is insanely slow. So slow USB booting is a known major performance boost. The Pi needs an M.2 or mSATA connector for an SSD.

      I'm looking for the Pi C+ with hardware ANN (the new MIT design, preferably, if cheap enough) and M.2, along with 8G RAM. A hardware RAM accelerator would be nice, too; but software memory compression actually has incredibly-high performance, so much that running nearly 50% if your RAM at 3:1 doesn't show a visible performance hit for most workloads.

      It might be tech

      • Apparently no one knows the original reason for building the Pi. It was to have the absolute cheapest platform to hack on for students. You need a better CPU or a SATA port? Pony up that extra $20 and buy something better.

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot@worf.ERDOSnet minus math_god> on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @12:51PM (#56260409)

          Apparently no one knows the original reason for building the Pi. It was to have the absolute cheapest platform to hack on for students. You need a better CPU or a SATA port? Pony up that extra $20 and buy something better.

          The problem is, the Pi has something a lot of other boards don't - a community. Most alternative Pi boards are released with outdated software and that's it - the manufacturer stops supporting it and it rots. But eh Raspberry Pi is well supported and kept up to date by a while pile of people, who are able and willing to help people with their problems.

          The Pi's greatest asset is not the hardware, but the fact there's a huge community willing to help you out.

        • by nnull ( 1148259 )

          But it has become so much more than that now than just for students to toy around with. They're all over the place and being used for a lot of things, including even critical stuff lately. They've proven to be quite reliable and cheap to replace if necessary. Building redundant Raspberry Pi systems is a snap to do, since they're so cheap and with linux, easy to do. The size itself is a big plus. Hell, I've seen a guy build an entire machine out of a Raspberry Pi, no PLC. And quite a few big name industrial

      • Re:Moar RAM! (Score:5, Informative)

        by sl3xd ( 111641 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @12:49PM (#56260389) Journal

        The SD card is insanely slow.

        If that's your concern, then you can always network boot the Pi-3, which is a better option for reliability anyway.

        At the end of the day, though, with the Raspberry Pi, you will always use a somewhat dated Broadcom SoC. (The Pi's designers are Broadcom employees).

        Those SoC's aren't "general purpose" devices. The Pi is cheap because it repurposes a chip that is produced by the billion and designed for TV's, set top boxes, and disc players. The SoC's are designed to handle a few MiB/sec of HD Video, to be decoded & pushed via HDMI. They can do GPU tasks to give the set-top box a better UI. They are not designed for serious I/O.

        The Pi is designed, first, foremost, and always, to be cheap. Every single one of the performance enhancements you mention don't matter to the million-unit lot SoC's used for set top boxes, and would require custom chips, driving the cost beyond the Pi foundation's goals.

        If you want the latest and greatest technologies, then you better expect to pay dearly for them. The Pi uses old tech because it's cheap.

    • by amiga3D ( 567632 )

      Most projects don't need more RAM. I don't use the pi as a desktop and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for that use. I've got an old core2duo 2.8ghz laptop with 4GB of RAM and 500GB drive I picked up for 50 bucks that serves most of my surfing needs. The pi can't compete with that but the laptop can't do what the pi can do either.

    • I agree. More RAM would be a bigger priority for me.
  • Also PoE (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I can't believe this was left out of the summary: This board breaks out PoE and they are working on a HAT that will convert 48V PoE to the 5V required for the Pi. Or you can use it for other purposes.

    • by afidel ( 530433 )

      It's 802.3 AF mode A & B, just in case anyone was wondering like I was what version. Also the 802.11ac upgrade is very nice since it means support for the less crowded 5GHz band, it also uses the superior cavity antenna from the pi zero so wireless performance in marginal signal situations should be about 2x the previous model.

  • what is the point of gig-e when all io is on 1 usb bus?

    • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @10:53AM (#56259443)

      For one, gigabit means that you could in theory get nearly half a gigabit, which is still higher than 100 mbit.

      For another, and this is rare, there do exist network switches in the world that do not negotiate lower than 1 gigabit. I've only seen one model from one vendor so far that did this, and I think that product flopped in part due to inability to handle 100 mbit, but if I've seen one, there's probably more.

      Finally, it may not be possible to get a 100 mbit NIC anymore, or at least do so and get any savings out of it. It's like in embedded you have flash parts that are 80% empty, because the cheapest flash parts are now still 4x the size some of these applications need.

    • by afidel ( 530433 )

      Previous model topped off at ~60Mbps, new model can do 330Mbps so even if you're pumping it back out to another I/O device you still could theoretically get ~160Mbps which is a significant improvement.

    • what is the point of gig-e when all io is on 1 usb bus?

      From the article:

      "While the USB 2.0 connection to the application processor limits the available bandwidth, we still see roughly a threefold increase in throughput compared to Raspberry Pi 3B."

      You'd have to generate a lot of IO to drop below the original 3B throughput.

    • This is a question from the 1980's. Let's ask Mr. Owl. He knows everything. (but rephrased from the 1980's)

      Mr. Owl: Why do I need 10 Mbps ethernet card for $1,000 when my computer can barely sustain 1 Mbps?

      Mr. Owl says: it's not all about your node's sustained throughput. It's about the capacity of the network you are connected to. Higher bits per second means higher capacity and therefore ability to have more packets flowing, although not necessary to and from your node.
      • by afidel ( 530433 )

        Um, asynchronous switches with buffers have been a thing since forever, this isn't a tokenring network.

  • Nice timing, releasing this on Pi Day [wikipedia.org]
  • A young man who is going out on a date may need to understand how hardware works.

    Speaking seriously, the RPI 3 B+ is a good start to learn hardware and computing of the physical world.
    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      I was once walking out of a marina at night and saw a couple of teenagers parked across the parking lot. I finished loading stuff in my car, locked the gate, and noticed that they weren't making out anymore, they were standing behind the car and she looked irritated. So I walked over and asked if everything was okay. He said the car wouldn't start, and demonstrated. I said it sounded an awful lot like a dead battery, but he vehemently denied that could be the case. I talked him into letting me hook up

  • The biggest improvement in the RPi I've been looking forward to is USB3/GBe. It's nice in the model 3 they added GBe, but it's pretty much pointless if you go and plug it into a USB2 port.

    Real World Expected Speeds:

    • 100mbps eth = ~8MB/s
    • 1GBe = ~110MB/s
    • USB2 = ~14MB/s
    • USB3 = ~250MB/s

    Thus, on the RPi3, GBe @ USB2 speeds means, MAYBE 14MB/s, BUT as others have noted, other IO devices on the RPIs share the same bus, so real-world speeds will be less. UGH.

  • Network AND storage over a shared USB 2 bus?

    Nah, no thanks.

    • What you're building a $35 file server and expecting commercial level performance or something?

      • Yes. Moore's Law 'n' all.
      • by kriston ( 7886 )

        Orange Pi is cheaper and doesn't cheap out on the storage and networking like the Raspberry Pi does.

        • Which one? There's about a million models, all with pros and cons. You see anytime anyone says something is better than something else without asking details about the application for a device this versatile they are instantly wrong.

          • by kriston ( 7886 )

            That's not how logic works. I guess it's working out for you somehow.

            Every Orange Pi performs better than Raspberry Pi when it comes to storage and networking. There you are.

            Source: I own every Raspberry Pi and four different Orange Pi models and have benchmarked each.

            • Every Orange Pi performs better than Raspberry Pi when it comes to storage and networking.

              Maybe you should spend less time benchmarking and more time re-reading what I wrote. But by all means you can keep doubling down with the exact opposite of the point I was making.

      • by kenh ( 9056 )

        Does the Raspberry Pi offer iLo or other remote system management options? Battery-backed hardware RAID?

  • They still don't have gigabit networking on board? The orange pi does I believe at near half the cost.

    Very happy with my pi's but using networking over USB is simply not going to happen

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