Hi guys!
This topic is for discussion, so all opinions are welcome!
A few days ago my customers began to ask me about a new platform
Raspberry Pi. The most exiting thing about this device - its price $25
or $35 per unit. Frankly speaking I don't too much about differences
in Cortex-A8/ARM11 architectures but they declare that:
The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with
floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is
capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a
fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG
libraries.
Why did you select the ARM11?
Cost and performance.
How powerful is it?
The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and
1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode.
The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general
purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA
infrastructure.
That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level
of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a
300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.
So, comparing to OMAP3 this Broadcom is better in terms of FullHD
playback, while even BB-XM is hardly capable to playback 720p.
Beaglebone is even weaker but the price 2.5 times higher.
Can anybody explain the pros and cons of Raspberry in comparison with
Beagleboard/Beaglebone?