On Wed, Mar 02, 2016 at 04:13:20PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
and just two months after I bought a Pi 2 from Microsoft Store.
Here are some highlights, possibly inaccurately remembered.
Better - Arm A53: significantly faster than the A7(?) in the Pi 2. 64-bit
About 50% faster as far as I can tell.
- built in bluetooth and WiFi. These apparently go through SDIO, bypassing the USB bottleneck.
Or at least use a different bottleneck and won't get the the way of USB.
- faster clocking for the GPU (I think)
Yes 400MHz rather than 250MHz. Hence it can now do 1080p60 rather than 1080p30. I think they said 3D performance is up about 20%, while video decoding is up by 40% or so.
Worse:
- takes more power to run. You might need a new power supply
It does use a bit more, just like the Pi2 used a bit more than the Pi. The Pi 3 apparently needs 2.5A 5V supply.
Same:
- no price increase!
- same case and peripherals as Pi 2 (but LEDs move)
- all USB is 2.0 (no USB 3.x)
- too much goes through a single internal USB 2.0 bus (ethernet, 4 usb ports)
- although the processor is 64-bit, the software is still 32-bit. I hope that this will change.
Well nothing prevents you from building and installing 64bit software. Of course with only 1GB ram still, there might not be any point, although using the 64bit isntruction set in 32bit mode would gain some nice new features (which is what the Cortex-A32 is made for, which is an A35 with the 64bit support removed, saving 10% power)
- 1G of RAM
They did change it from 450 to 900MHz ram though. -- Len ~orensen