The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi

Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by Teknoman117 on Monday February 28, 2022 @02:14PM (#30503730)

Before the Pi I'd bought a number of BeagleBoards over the years.

I still have a few BeagleBoard xMs and original BeagleBones sitting around. The bone specifically was super neat in that it had a ton of IO (PWM, A2D, encoder inputs, SPI, UART, etc.) that could be controlled by either the CPU or microcontrollers embedded in the SoC.

Problem is at this point I have no idea what to do with any of them. ARM CPUs got so much faster in such a short span of time that it feels like arm boards from a few years ago are kind of just junk today. There are many dirt cheap boards that are way faster than a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 (or the 700 MHz armv6 core in the OG Pi) available today.

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Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by blippage on Monday February 28, 2022 @02:32PM (#30504002)

I've never owned a Beagle. I discovered earlier this year that they were open hardware and even had real-time capabilities. It struck me that this is what the Pi should have been.

Then I saw the price. So I'll be sticking with Pis.

It would be a master-stroke if the Pi gained real-time capabilities.

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Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by Teknoman117 on Monday February 28, 2022 @03:33PM (#30504758)

The BeagleBone Black was $45 at launch (10 years ago, ouch), which was $10 more than the Pi B. At this point they certainly seem to have abandoned that price point.

The first BeagleBone (the 'White') was $85, but it had a JTAG debugger embedded in it so you could actually single step through the Linux kernel if you wanted.

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Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by schaefer on Monday February 28, 2022 @06:03PM (#30506408)

I share that sentiment. I'm so sad that the Beagle project doesn't come out with a CPU refresh.

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Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by myself248 on Monday February 28, 2022 @07:26PM (#30507313)

The BBAI doesn't count?

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Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by Teknoman117 on Monday February 28, 2022 @09:13PM (#30508398)

Sort of, but they tripled the price to take the CPU cores from 2010 (single A8) to 2012 (dual A15). I know the whole point of the BB is the real-time capabilities and the two DSP cores, but I do wish the application CPUs were faster. Now that there's compute support for the GPU in the Pi4, I wonder what the performance difference is (in AI stuff).

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Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by myself248 on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @02:18PM (#30518695)

That's all fair. I love that the BB platform is so stable, I can design around it with reasonable confidence that my gizmo will still work in _another_ decade, which is a perspective only recently coming to the Pi world. But there are certainly sacrifices made in that approach.

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Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by schaefer on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @02:27PM (#30518814)

Beaglebone AI was released: April 23, 2013.

Considering we're in early 2022, no. I wouldn't call that a refresh.

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Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by myself248 on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @03:15PM (#30532430)

That's a typo, where did you find it? The BBAI announcement was February of 2019, and shipped in September of that year.

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Re:The Life of Pi: Ten Years of Raspberry Pi by schaefer on Thursday March 03, 2022 @12:27PM (#30543867)

You are right, I was wrong. My apologies.

It looks like the date I quoted was the release date for an older variant of the beagle.

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