back to article Turbocharged quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed, global geekgasm likely

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is likely to provoke a global geekgasm today with the surprise release of the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. It's a turbocharged version of the Pi B+, boasting a new Broadcom BCM2836 900MHz quad-core system-on-chip with 1GB of RAM – all of which will drive performance "at least 6x" that of the B+. Speaking …

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  1. ZSn

    Competitors dead in the water?

    Well this has categorically answered the competitors such as the Odroid C1. Now I know that this is probably a stupid question, but does all the linux software have to be recompiled for this machine or like the B -> B+ can you just slot the micro SD from one to the other and it just run.

    I can't wait to get my hands on one!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Competitors dead in the water?

      It's the same arch, just unplug, plug n go

    2. Lester Haines (Written by Reg staff) Gold badge

      Re: Competitors dead in the water?

      Not a stupid question, but one I can't answer. We did a fresh install of Raspbian, so can't say if the SD swap would work. One for the experts...

      1. Richard Taylor 2

        Re: Competitors dead in the water?

        A simple swap worked for us.

        1. Lester Haines (Written by Reg staff) Gold badge

          Re: Re: Competitors dead in the water?

          There you go, question answered.

    3. Zola

      Re: Competitors dead in the water?

      From a software perspective, the Pi2 is 100% backward compatible with the Pi1. All existing Pi1 software runs just fine on the Pi2.

      You can take a single Raspbian image (updates will be made available later today) and run it on both the Pi1 and Pi2 - the Pi2 will boot using the kernel7.img while the Pi1 will use the existing kernel.img.

      However recompilation is recommended for optimal performance (ARMv6 to ARMv7 with NEON), but definitely not essential.

    4. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: Competitors dead in the water?

      Well this has categorically answere

      No it has not. Still 100 MBIt and no SATA. So it is still as useless as the previous one for microsdesktop (in a network), thin client duties or a NAS. If you want any of these you will still have to (grudgingly) shell out for an x86 based system :(

      It is probably even worse than the B+ in terms of power budget too. B+ is barely useful (I got 3-4 in use for security apps) because it has under 200mA or thereabouts left after the SoC consumes its share. It really, really, really needs a proper power plug instead of still faffing around with micro-USB. Otherwise these 4 USBs are useless - you can realistically use only one or two.

      The B+ was fine for classic Pi IO duties (sans the power issues) in a IO/Network application and that was about it. For that two cores, 512M and 100Mbit are enough.

      If Pi will really insist on trying to do something in the "desktop" space it should try better than this and put a Gigabit Soc on the board.

      1. Adrian 4

        Re: Competitors dead in the water?

        @Voland's right hand

        Useful comments, but it DOES have a real power plug : you can provide power through the "gpio" pin header.

        I would never use a barrel jack on a permanent installation : I'd rather use the micro usb. But the right way to do it imho is to make a carrier board with a suitable power supply and any signal conditioning / pin protection etc. and drop the pi (or even the naked version) onto that. Then use proper connectors like the green plugin ones or whatever the rest of your system uses to connect it in.

        Microusb is just for bench lashups. Barrel jacks are a bygone age, barely good enough even for chargers.

        1. Stevie

          Re: would never use a barrel jack on a permanent installation

          Why the hate-on for barrel jacks Adrian 4?

          I just upgraded the Chateau Stevie Visual Ents Suite from the old Phillips CRT and surround sound DVD wotsit and my Voyage of Discovery showed that pretty much all the equipment options as far as flat screen TVs, soundbars, sub-woofers and Blu-ray players all featured barrel jack power supply connectors.

          I'm not trying to pick a fight. I'm genuinely interested in your objections to them.

      2. The BigYin

        Re: Competitors dead in the water?

        I see that @"Voland's right hand" is another person who completely and utterly misses the *entire point* of a RasPi.

        1. JEDIDIAH
          Linux

          Re: Competitors dead in the water?

          > I see that @"Voland's right hand" is another person who completely and utterly misses the *entire point* of a RasPi.

          True. But he has plenty of company though. And those people like to sing the praises of the PI for applications that it's not really suited for.

          Some of the shameless fanboy gushing needs to be mitigated by a little bit of justified skepticism.

          Been there. Done that.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Competitors dead in the water?

        Although I would like to a model with at least 2 Ethernet Gb ports <G> it's not really the design target for this devices. Nor I will probably build a NAS on such hardware were file processing and storage reliability is very important.

        The Pi are really aimed at a different market - the stress on Arduino compatibility is not there for nothing, and although they can be used for other tasks, if you really need a board for thin client or NAS duties there are other board or devices better suited of the tasks, although more expensive.

      4. JDX Gold badge

        Re: Still 100 MBIt and no SATA

        Why is 100MBit useless? For most desktop duties that's just fine and as a thin-client, it's total overkill.

        1. Woodnag

          Re: Still 100 MBIt and no SATA

          Also, 100Mbit allows power-over-ethernet with the two spare TPs.

          1. jamestr

            Re: Still 100 MBIt and no SATA

            No offense, but many devices support -active- PoE on gigabit. Unless you're fine with the prospects of your Pi being under/over volted by passive PoE... be my guest!

      5. Jim 59

        Re: Competitors dead in the water?

        Not much point in putting gigabit on here, the CPU wouldn't have the power to leverage it, even with quad core hows-your-father. It might *just* max out 100Mb/s, will be interesting to see test results though. Even if it just maxes out Fast Ethernet, (say 12 Mbyte/s), that's not bad. According to my measurements, the Pi B (not overclocked) achieved about 7 Mbyte/s acting as a NAS.

      6. The Indomitable Gall

        Re: Competitors dead in the water?

        Still 100 MBIt and no SATA.

        <p>And still no sign of audio in. I mean, seriously -- the Broadcom SoC was designed for camcorders and embedded multimedia, but there's no ADC anywhere on the Pi board. It's an unbelievably odd design decision.

    5. mafoo

      Ethernet

      Does it still use USB host ethernet controller? If it does I'll stick with my BananaPi. I've been rather impressed by it's performance.

    6. Bob Vistakin
      Linux

      Re: Competitors dead in the water?

      Android ICS has already been ported to the Pi, but as it turned out it just about fit but with no room for apps and clunky performance. Both are addressed handsomely with this new model. Can't comment on how iOS or Windows Mobile works on it since in this IOT crazy world their owners wisely stuck to their closed source model...

    7. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: Competitors dead in the water?

      The announcement on the official site is saying Windows 10 will be available on the Pi this year too.

      I've read it and re-read it and read it again. I've checked that I am actually awake and lucid. It definitely says Windows 10.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Competitors dead in the water?

        Better install Windows 8 on it now so you can upgrade for free.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Competitors dead in the water?

          there's a Forbes article about "Microsoft comeback inevitable" that suggests the Upgrade upgrade is a mechanism for getting Windows 7 users to upgrade, so let us know how you get on with your Win8 install please ...

          ;-)

    8. AlAl

      Re: Competitors dead in the water?

      From today you should be able to ‘apt-get upgrade’ on an existing Raspbian installation to add an ARMv7 kernel to your distribution. The SD card can then be used — assuming it’s a Micro SD Card — to boot either a first or second generation Pi. Card images, along with a new NOOBS image, will also be posted that support both boards. More at http://makezine.com/2015/02/02/eben-upton-raspberry-pi-2/.

    9. Hugo CHAV

      Re: Competitors dead in the water?

      When was the last time you could get such significant upgrade of a PC for $35, i can just see pretty much anyone who has one upgrading, having said that the price point leaves it with only OK memory and bandwidth, so there should still be room for commercial competitors, ( I think a UK charitable trust killing commercial competitors completely might not be such a great Idea politically also)

      1. JEDIDIAH

        Re: Competitors dead in the water?

        > When was the last time you could get such significant upgrade of a PC for $35

        The last time I saved an old PC from the dumpster by putting a cheap Nvidia card into it.

    10. Horridbloke

      Re: Competitors dead in the water?

      I have just taken delivery of my pi 2 and had a brief play with it. The raspbian image was updated using apt-get on the old hardware yesterday in readiness. The pi 2 booted and ran much much faster - the difference is much like we used to enjoy when upgrading from a five-year-old pc to the latest and greatest back in the nineties. The GUI, Epiphany browser and LibreOffice all ran pretty smooth. Considering this is currently running userland binaries for the older architecture I'm impressed.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nerdgasm?

    Well I nearly lost bladder control. Does that count?

    1. BillDarblay

      Re: Nerdgasm?

      Maybe not but loss of bowel control certainly would!

      Need one of these bad boys for my openelec rig now - 5.1 DTS hi bit rate AND fiddle about with menus at the same time without jitter. Blaaaaah!

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Coffee/keyboard

        Re: Nerdgasm?

        Quick, somebody draw a 2D anime girl in the throes of nerdgasm.

  3. Sampler

    Awesome

    Appears to be layout compatible with the B+ so existing cases will be alright (such as the awesome PiBows by Pimoroni) - I had been quite tempted to get a B+ even though it wouldn't help my struggling little Pi, now I'm sold - the current one struggles to run everything I throw at it (which, to be fair is a helluva lot for a little box) so this is great news!

    1. Lester Haines (Written by Reg staff) Gold badge

      Re: Awesome

      As far as I can see, it's an identical form factor to the B+, so yup, no problem with existing kit.

      1. James Hughes 1

        Re: Awesome

        There is a minor issue with the PiBow coupe, but Pimoroni have fixed it already.

    2. mark.d

      Re: Awesome

      Lady Ada says that the pibow has a problem with some cases as the processor cutout is differently shaped, so expect a new revision shortly.

      Under the "what to watch out for" section https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-2-model-b?view=all

      >>

      "This means that 99% of cases designed for the Raspberry Pi Model B+ will work with the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. This includes the Adafruit B+ Pi cases

      One exception is some Pibow cases which have a layer that has cutouts for the specific location of the processor. Pimoroni has informed us that they will have a new case design that is compatible with both. Check the description of any case to make sure it is compatible with both Raspberry Pi Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2 Model B"

      1. paulc

        Re: Awesome

        it's pretty easy to modify the offending layer to fit using simple tools...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    *Really* Open Source now ?

    So, has Broadcom seen the light and really opened up all it's dirty secrets ?

    Or not ?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: *Really* Open Source now ?

      Sort of (Google gallium vc4). The firmware is still closed source - although partially reversed engineered.

      Depends if you consider firmware important. Which judging from the lack of people jumping at helping the RE work, most people don't.

      On the downside of the rpi2 - I was really hoping that the RPI would be a standard electronic component. Not one of 500 slightly different (and subtly incompatible) variants...

      1. Andrew Tyler 1

        Re: *Really* Open Source now ?

        While I agree that most customers probably don't care, at least not directly, about bare metal and the double secret Broadcom documentation, I don't see RE participation as meaning much. There wouldn't be any need to reverse engineer anything if the Broadcom would just release the real documentation or, *gasp* even the source, if the Raspberry Pi foundation would have picked an SOC from a more reasonable supplier. I think in the long run, it would have been worth an extra couple bucks, even for the people who just want a cheap linux computer.

        I do tend to harp on about this, but it is an ugly black spot on an otherwise lovely idea. While I think this new Pi looks swell, I'll wait and see what TI does in response with their Beagle line.

        1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

          Re: *Really* Open Source now ?

          I've said it before with the Beaglebone - nothing wrong with the hardware, it's superb and still better than the Pi2 in some respects. However the OS is, or at least was, appalling. The Pi foundation claim they have "the most stable single board computer in the world" and I would certainly agree with that.

          So it's not TI that need to respond, it's the beagleboard team, and they just don't have the same resources (including goodwill) that the Pi foundation have acquired to achieve this.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: *Really* Open Source now ?

            "I've said it before with the Beaglebone - nothing wrong with the hardware, it's superb and still better than the Pi2 in some respects. However the OS is, or at least was, appalling"

            If you're talking about Angstrom then I agree, however I gave up and slapped Debian on it, soooo much easier, nice little board now.

        2. DuncanL

          Re: *Really* Open Source now ?

          The fact that the Pi even exists is because most of the team work from Broadcom and managed to get a deal from their employers to use the SOC at a rate that nobody else could get.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: *Really* Open Source now ?

          This. As long as Broadcom are involved, referring to the Pi as being 'open' is somewhat disingenous.

          It looks nice and the spec is close to what it probably should have been in the first place, but given their track record with open-source the Broadcom angle is a dealbreaker for me. The Beaglebone Black and Cubieboard3 are both credible alternatives even if they do lack the Pi's media presence.

          To each their own.

      2. YetAnotherLocksmith Silver badge

        Re: *Really* Open Source now ?

        Er... It is plug&play compatible, forward and backwards, by the action of a single update. Even the cases fit the same.

        Not sure your complaint is valid.

  5. wx666z

    Me too, please?

    I'll buy one, as soon as I can track it down in the U.S.A., MCM doesn't list it yet, 8-(...

  6. PleebSmash

    usb ports

    I forgot about the addition of 2 more USB ports, the killer feature.

    Inb4 gigabit ethernet.

    1. borkbork

      Re: usb ports

      POE would be nice too...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: PoE

        PoE is always nice to have.

        If you want cheap PoE just to avoid the extra cable, passive PoE widgets are now widely available starting from £5 or so (covering both ends) from the usual suspects.

        Proper industry-standard PoE widgets will still probably cost about as much as the Pi itself, or more ?

        I really don't understand why low-end PoE hasn't replaced wallwarts in so much more consumer equipment. At least some stuff e.g. my cheap £30 chinese AP/router is starting to have it now.

        Is there a non-trivial licence fee involved for PoE or some other thing that's deterring legitimate SoHo kit manufacturers?

        1. Adrian 4

          Re: PoE

          Chicken/egg problem, I think. Can't sell PoE unless the user has a PoE hub, no need for a PoE hub without lots of gadgets that use it. And most consumers use wireless anyway.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: PoE

            "most consumers use wireless anyway."

            Where does the "wireless" gadget get its power from? Usually a wire from a wallwart. Frequently a different and incompatible wallwart for every different gadget.

            Replace the massive variety of wallwarts with a smaller selection of PoE. Just use it for power if there's no need for a LAN connection.

            OK it might upset a variety of Chinese wallwart suppliers and their intermediaries, but maybe they could do something different instead e.g. get ready for next generation USB power...

            What's not to like?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    damn

    I bought a B+ on Friday

    1. Quantum Leaper

      Re: damn

      I wouldn't worry, you will get 2 years of enjoyment out of it, before the RPI2 is release. The other websites that had info on the new version stated 2017 is release date.

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