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RaspberryPi

Raspberry Pi Model B

Raspberry Pi[]

Raspberry Pi - Model A

Raspberry Pi Model A

RaspiModelB

Raspberry Pi Model B

2000px-Raspberrypi pcb overview v04

Location on the PCB of connectors and major ICs

2000px-Raspberrypi block function v01

Block diagram of the Model-B; in a Model-A the lowest two blocks and the rightmost block are missing (note that these three blocks are in a chip that actually contains a three-port USB hub, with a USB Ethernet adapter connected to one of its ports). In the Model-A the USB port is connected directly to the SoC.

2000px-Raspberrypi video API 03

Visual diagram of API connections

Pros[]

  • Low power consumption
  • Cheap
  • Very active community

Cons[]

  • Extremely low power (per wats consumption taken into account)
  • Extremely shitty audio
  • USB and ethernet have their buses shared meaning they will be slow as fuck
  • Has a tendency to brick/corrupt SD cards. On that note, the SD card reader has a tendency to snap off the corner of some SD cards which will make the card unreadable in almost every other SD card reader you may find
  • It's ARMv6, meaning it needs special OSes (you can't just install any flavour of linux you want)
  • GPIO can only provide little amount of power per pin, meaning if the thing attached to it needs more power, you might fry the pi

Applications[]

Hosting[]

Communications[]

Audio[]

Media[]

Gaming[]


Performance & overclocking[]

The Broadcom SoC used in the Raspberry Pi is equivalent to a chip used in an old smartphone (Android or iPhone). While operating at 700 MHz by default, the Raspberry Pi provides a real world performance roughly equivalent to the 0.041 GFLOPs.[1][2] On the CPU level the performance is similar to a 300 MHz Pentium II of 1997-1999[3] and the GPU however provides 1 Gpixel/s, 1.5 Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and the graphics capabilities of the Raspberry Pi are roughly equivalent to the level of performance of the Xbox of 2001.[3] The Raspberry Pi chip operating at 700 MHz by default, will not become hot enough to need a heatsink or special cooling.[3]

The LINPACK single node compute benchmark results in a mean single precision performance of 0.065 GFLOPs and a mean double precision performance of 0.041 GFLOPs for one Raspberry Pi Ver. B board.[4] A cluster of 64 Raspberry Pi Ver. B computers, labeled "Iridis-pi", achieved a LINPACK HPL suite result of 1.14 GFLOPs (n=10240) at 216 watts for c. US$4,000.[4]

Most Raspberry Pi devices can be overclocked to 800 MHz and some even higher to 1000 MHz. Via the Raspbian Linux distro the overclocking options on boot can be done by a software command running "sudo raspi-config" without voiding the warranty. In case of issues, the overclocking settings can be reduced until stability is restored, or one can put an appropriately sized heatsink on it.[3]

Specifications[]

Model A Model B
Target price:[5] US$ 25 US$ 35[6]
SoC:[5] Broadcom BCM2835 (CPU, GPU, DSP, SDRAM, and single USB port)[7]
CPU: 700 MHz ARM1176JZF-S core (ARM11 family, ARMv6 instruction set)[7]
GPU: Broadcom VideoCore IV @ 250 MHz[8][9]
OpenGL ES 2.0 (24 GFLOPS)
MPEG-2 and VC-1 (with license[10]), 1080p30 h.264/MPEG-4 AVC high-profile decoder and encoder[7]
Memory (SDRAM): 256 MB (shared with GPU) 512 MB (shared with GPU) as of 15 October 2012
USB 2.0 ports:[11] 1 (direct from BCM2835 chip) 2 (via the built in integrated 3-port USB hub)[12]
Video input: A CSI input connector allows for the connection of a RPF designed camera module[13]
Video outputs:[5] Composite RCA (PAL and NTSC), HDMI (rev 1.3 & 1.4),[14] raw LCD Panels via DSI[15][16]

14 HDMI resolutions from 640×350 to 1920×1200 plus various PAL and NTSC standards.[17]

Audio outputs:[5] 3.5 mm jack, HDMI, and, as of revision 2 boards, I²S audio[18] (also potentially for audio input)
Onboard storage:[11] SD / MMC / SDIO card slot (3.3 V card power support only)
Onboard network:[5][11] None 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet (8P8C) USB adapter on the third port of the USB hub[12]
Low-level peripherals: 8 × GPIO,[19] UART, I²C bus, SPI bus with two chip selects, I²S audio[20] +3.3 V, +5 V, ground[8][21]
Power ratings: 300 mA (1.5 W)[22] 700 mA (3.5 W)
Power source:[5] 5 V via MicroUSB or GPIO header
Size: 85.60 mm × 56 mm (3.370 in × 2.205 in)[23]
Weight: 45 g (1.6 oz)[24]
Operating systems: Arch Linux ARM,[25] Debian GNU/Linux, Gentoo, Fedora, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan 9, Raspbian OS, RISC OS,[26] Slackware Linux[27]
Notes
  1. Model A and Model B are cultural references[28] to the original models of the British educational BBC Micro computer, developed by Acorn Computers, who originally developed the ARM processors (the architecture of the Raspberry Pi) and operating system RISC OS, which will also be able to be run on the Raspberry Pi (version 5.17).[26]
  2. On the older beta model B boards, 128 MB was allocated by default to the GPU, leaving 128 MB for the CPU.[29] On the first 256 MB release model B (and Model A), three different splits were possible. The default split was 192 MB (CPU RAM), which should be sufficient for standalone 1080p video decoding, or for simple 3D, but probably not for both together. 224 MB was for Linux only, with just a 1080p framebuffer, and was likely to fail for any video or 3D. 128 MB was for heavy 3D, possibly also with video decoding (e.g. XBMC).[30] Comparatively the Nokia 701 uses 128 MB for the Broadcom VideoCore IV.[31] For the new model B with 512 MB RAM initially there were new standard memory split files released( arm256_start.elf, arm384_start.elf, arm496_start.elf) for 256 MB, 384 MB and 496 MB CPU RAM (and 256 MB, 128 MB and 16 MB video RAM). But a week or so later the RPF released a new version of start.elf that could read a new entry in config.txt (gpu_mem=xx) and could dynamically assign an amount of RAM (from 16 to 256 MB in 8 MB steps) to the GPU, so the older method of memory splits became obsolete, and a single start.elf worked the same for 256 and 512 MB Pis.[32]
  3. Level 2 cache is 128 KB, used primarily by the GPU, not the CPU.
  4. The ARM11 is based on version 6 of the ARM architecture (ARMv6k), which due to its age is no longer supported by several popular versions of Linux, including Ubuntu which dropped support for processors below ARMv7 in 2009.[33]
  5. The Raspberry Pi also contains a 15-pin MIPI camera interface (CSI) connector, which is used with the Raspberry Pi Camera Addon.[34][35]
  6. Support for raw LCD panels is available in hardware through the available DSI connector from the Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance.[15] Software support is being planned.
  7. Supported digital video resolutions are: 640 × 350 EGA; 640 × 480 VGA; 800 × 600 SVGA; 1024 × 768 XGA; 1280×720 720p HDTV; 1280 × 768 WXGA Variant; 1280 × 800 WXGA Variant; 1280 × 1024 SXGA; 1366 × 768 WXGA Variant; 1400 × 1050 SXGA+; 1600 × 1200 UXGA; 1680 × 1050 WXGA+; 1920 × 1080 1080p HDTV; 1920 × 1200 WUXGA.[17] Also to be supported are the generation of 576i and 480i composite video signals for PAL-BGHID, PAL-M, PAL-N, NTSC and NTSC-J[36]
  8. Size dimensions do not include overhanging components such as the USB and RCA connectors.
  9. Newer versions of the firmware contain the option to choose between five overclock ("turbo") presets that when turned on try to get the most performance out of the SoC without impairing the lifetime of the Pi. This is done by monitoring the core temperature of the chip, and the CPU load, and dynamically adjusting clock speeds and the core voltage. When the demand is low on the CPU, or it is running too hot, the performance is throttled, but if the CPU has much to do, and the chip's temperature is acceptable, performance is temporarily increased, with clock speeds of up to 1 GHz, depending on the individual board, and on which of the turbo settings is used. The five settings are:
    1. None; 700 MHz ARM, 250 MHz core, 400 MHz SDRAM, 0 overvolt,
    2. Modest; 800 MHz ARM, 250 MHz core, 400 MHz SDRAM, 0 overvolt,
    3. Medium 900 MHz ARM, 250 MHz core, 450 MHz SDRAM, 2 overvolt,
    4. High; 950 MHz ARM, 250 MHz core, 450 MHz SDRAM, 6 overvolt,
    5. Turbo; 1000 MHz ARM, 500 MHz core, 600 MHz SDRAM, 6 overvolt[37][38]

In the highest (turbo) preset the SDRAM clock was originally 500 MHz, but this was later changed to 600 MHz because 500 MHz sometimes causes SD card corruption. Simultaneously in high mode the core clock speed was lowered from 450 to 250 MHz, and in medium mode from 333 to 250 MHz.

List of operating systems[]

This is a list of operating systems that have been, or are being, ported to Raspberry Pi:

  • Full OS:
    • AROS
    • ChibiOS/RT[39]
    • Haiku[40]
    • Linux
      • Android
        • Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)
        • Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
      • Arch Linux ARM
      • Debian ARM architecture ports, but not the Debian ARMhf architecture ports (introduced with Debian 7 Wheezy), since these are compiled for ARMv7 and the Raspberry Pi CPU is ARMv6
        • Raspbian[41] (Debian 7 Wheezy ARMhf backported for ARMv6)
          • XBian
      • Firefox OS
      • Puppy Linux[42]
      • Gentoo Linux[43]
      • Google Chromium OS
      • openSUSE[44]
      • PiBang Linux[45]
      • Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix
      • Slackware ARM (formerly ARMedslack)
      • QtonPi, a cross-platform application framework based Linux distribution based on the Qt framework
      • WebOS
    • Plan 9 from Bell Labs[47][48]
    • RISC OS
    • Unix
    • Windows CE[52]
  • Multi-purpose light distributions:
    • Moebius operating system, a light ARM HF distribution based on Debian. It uses Raspbian repository, but it fits in a 1 GB SD card. It has just minimal services and its memory usage is optimized to keep a small footprint.
    • Minibian, another light ARM HF distribution based on Raspbian repository.
    • OpenWrt "Attitude Adjustment" 12.09
    • Squeezed Arm Puppy, a version of Puppy Linux (Puppi) for the ARMv6 (sap6) specifically for the Raspberry Pi.[53]
    • Kali Linux
  • Single-purpose light distributions:
    • IPFire
    • OpenELEC
    • Raspbmc
    • RasPlex
    • Raspberry Digital signage, an operating system for digital signage purposes (web and media views)
    • Ark OS, website and email self-hosting


Archived 4chandata threads[]

Related[]

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  18. I2S driver development thread
  19. More GPIOs can be used if you do not use the low level peripherals
  20. Since the release of the revision 2 model
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  30. Raspberry Pi boot configuration text file
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  32. introducing new firmware for the 512 MB Pi
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