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Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership:
[The Raspberry Pi] Foundation has announced that it is joining the RISC-V Foundation, suggesting that a shift away from Arm could be on the cards. "We're excited to have joined the RISC-V Foundation as a silver member," the Raspberry Pi Foundation posted to its Twitter account. "[We're] hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and Debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture."
A shift from the proprietary Arm architecture to RISC-V would fit in nicely with the Foundation's goal of low-cost, highly-accessible computing for education and industry – but would put paid to its tradition of keeping backwards compatibility where possible, something it has already suggested might be the case when it moves away from the Broadcom BCM283x platform for the Raspberry Pi 4. Foundation co-founder Eben Upton, though, is clear: the Foundation is currently focusing on supporting the ISA in software, and not with a development board launch.
I'm curious how many Soylentils have a Raspberry Pi (or more than one) and which model(s). How has your experience been? What are the positives and shortcomings you've encountered? Do you think it would be a good move for them to move to RISC-V?
More background on RISC-V is available at Wikipedia.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:02PM (6 children)
At $10 or even $5 for a bare computer, why not? But it's pretty bare-- no case, no storage, no cables, no power supply. By the time you add all that, a Pi costs $50. And that's with the old trick of "monitor not included", a tactic that's been used since the 1980s to make PCs seem cheaper. Still a great deal, but not quite as fantastically throwaway cheap.
The main problem I have with the Pi and ARM platforms in general is lack of performance. I haven't looked in recent months, so the latest I have is a model 3. The ones I've tried are fine for the small display sizes of the typical smartphone, but strain to run a 1080p display. It's not so good for watching Youtube videos in a web browser on one 2K display, which I think is about the most severe of the everyday uses one might expect of a desktop machine for general purpose Internet browsing. True, watching video that way introduces unnecessary overhead, but lots of people do it. A low end PC is just plain better at 1080p video, and a laptop can be had for as low as $150, which is about the same price as a Pi with all the extras needed to make it a complete system.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:13PM (4 children)
The Pi isn't meant to be a general desktop replacement, and it would be fine if browsers didn't have so much overhead let alone the extra from video DRM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:40PM (2 children)
Bingo. I dont know why people cant get this thru their tiny minds.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:01PM (1 child)
It could be used as a desktop replacement, depending on what software you're using and what you're doing with the web browser.
Use adblock and script blocking in the browser like many here do, and that takes care of a lot of your problems.
Raspberry Pi 4 will likely not be made on a 40nm process node like its predecessors. If they bring it down to 28nm or 14nm, there could be a significant performance increase. Not enough for everybody, but most people don't need a state-of-the-art computer these days.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:25PM
Yes, I find Adblock absolutely essential on limited hardware such as older computers and Pis.
Another performance trick I stumbled over was turning off the font aliasing and hinting. That makes no noticeable difference on modern hardware, but on something like a 133 MHz Pentium from the 1990s, it helps a lot. Of course that makes most fonts look awful. One of the few that still looks good is Terminus.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:55PM
It could very well become that if hardware improvements outpace what the OS and typical software need. Even the bloated browsers.
It seems that the Broadcom BCM2837B0 used in Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is built on a 40nm process. The talk [raspberrypi.org] is that it is expensive to develop a new version using a more modern process node (duh) and that they have pretty much reached the limits of 40nm.
Eben Upton has said that the Pi Foundation would shift away from hardware for a few years [wired.co.uk]. When they do come back with a major hardware release, they might include [wired.co.uk]
something like a tensor processor, since Raspberry Pi is meant for students and machine learning is a big deal right now.
So maybe we'll see a RasPi 4 released as late as 2021, on a mature "14nm" process (around the time TSMC is making "5nm"), and packing some Google-sponsored AI hardware. The performance increases could be exceptional and more than enough to make it a usable desktop replacement.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Sunday January 13 2019, @12:09AM
No, it didn't make PCs seem cheaper, it made them cheaper - especially when they came with UHF modulators so you could plug them into the TV set that you already had... (proper monitors cost an arm and a leg in 1980 when there was no mass market for them...)
My first Pi spent most of its life providing DNS, DHCP and an endpoint for incoming SSH tunnels on my home network, for which it didn't need a keyboard, mouse or monitor after it had been set up. The second one spent a couple of years as a set-top box (acting as a front-end for TVHeadEnd on my too-noisy-for-the-living-room server) and is now acting as an audio player hooked up to my HiFi and is likewise headless. The third one, I actually bought the "official" touch screen for and I'm experimenting with using it as a sequencer/function generator for a Eurorack synth - and if that doesn't work out it could replace the audio player.
I could have tried to do these things with a jailbroken/rooted set top box or Android tablet - but they wouldn't have been any cheaper and wouldn't have anything like the level of online support. Also, a Pi can be swapped between tasks and back in a jiffy just by swapping out the SD card, without some touch-and-go re-flashing ritual.
The cheapness of the bare board is really important - if you find a permanent use for one, its an impulse buy to replace it, and if you try to hook one up to some electronics and let the magic smoke out there's not too much to cry over.
Yes there are drawbacks - all of the network/USB I/O is bottlenecked through a single and slightly quirky USB 2 port and relies on some proprietary binary blobs - but those are compromises resulting from using a mass-market system-on-a-chip designed to be embedded in consumer electronics and hence cheaply manufactured in vast quantities. Moving to full open-source, fixing the USB etc. is all well and good, but not if it ends up doubling the price.
There are lots of Pi alternatives that do one thing or another better - but the Pi is a good jack of all trades that combines reasonable general-purpose I/O, reasonable graphics and video performance, quite a decent CPU and completely unmatched community and commercial support.