D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
and just two months after I bought a Pi 2 from Microsoft Store.
A friend of mine in .nl says he got physical delivery of an RPi3 already earlier today. Not just hype it seems; too many product announcements have no apparent link to present-day reality.
Here are some highlights, possibly inaccurately remembered.
Better - Arm A53: significantly faster than the A7(?) in the Pi 2. 64-bit
- built in bluetooth and WiFi. These apparently go through SDIO, bypassing the USB bottleneck.
And in a lot of applications built-in wifi will cover your networking needs, freeing up USB bandwidth entirely for other uses and saving a cable's worth of clutter. (And when each cable is another chance to haul the poor wee computer straight off your desk that has to count for something!)
- faster clocking for the GPU (I think)
Worse:
- takes more power to run. You might need a new power supply
As long as it's still happy running fanless I'm happy too.
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.
It's early in the day everywhere for 64-bit ARM. It's a release architecture in Debian Jessie, though, so the software exists. Although the original Raspberry Pi had a bit of a weak processor and required a custom respin for that chip (Seneca at York's Fedora, or Raspbian) RPi2 supports real armhf[0] and one expects similar work will see 64-bit Jessie running on the RPi3. And with any luck all this will be integrated into the vanilla distro for the next release. [0] https://www.collabora.com/about-us/blog/2015/02/03/debian-jessie-on-raspberr...
- 1G of RAM
Remember when having the full 64K address space populated was still considered pretty nifty? -- Anthony de Boer