Smaller, Cheaper, Faster than the Pandora

[may88]

Steady on guys. I only posted it out of interest, and I was second to the party on that score. We all like little things. It's got some poke but it's no Pandora replacement.


I was drawing more parallels with someone starting out on the rocky road of producing a new piece of electronica.

This thread is pure Monty Python.

How do you make that out? No one dead parrot, Romans, Spam or swallows.

 

[dreamer]

Raspberry Pi is a charity, and their device is meant primarily for the education sector in both the developed and developing world.

Which imho is weird, since you need a screen with hdmi-input.


I for one won't buy it (yet) as I am not anywhere near an hdmi-capable screen.


Else I'd have to mess around with hdmi->vga converters and such.


Which would hardly make the device very portable.

 

[Prometheus]

Raspberry Pi is a charity, and their device is meant primarily for the education sector in both the developed and developing world.

Which imho is weird, since you need a screen with hdmi-input.

I gather that it can do composite output, as well. Or at least, that's what their website says.


(Incidentally, I hope that they do some sort of "Donate one, get one" type of scheme, as I'd certainly go for one or two of them if they do that. )

 

[doragasu]

Raspberry Pi is a charity, and their device is meant primarily for the education sector in both the developed and developing world.

Which imho is weird, since you need a screen with hdmi-input.

I gather that it can do composite output, as well. Or at least, that's what their website says.

And there are also HDMI to DVI adapters.

 

[Rebel]

I was coming on to post about this just now I think this is great and we need to support this, get it picked up for schools, as a prototyping / learning aid, a £15 linux PC is F'ing amazing.

 

[CFWhitman]

ARM11 is probably also using the ARMv7 instruction set. Performace of the ARM11 is worse/MHz compared to Cortex-A8 iirc.

I have an ARM11 device, and it's definitely an older architecture, and definitely worse per MHz than the Cortex-A8.


So, Yes.

 

[Exophase]

ARM11 is ARM6 with more instructions and improved pipelining. Raspberry Pi is indeed faster than the Pandora.

Edit: Oops, sorry the Pandora runs ARM7 not ARM6! But shouldn't a later architecture like ARM11 have better performance than an older one like ARM7 anyways? Benchmarks would probably show this.

ARM11 is probably also using the ARMv7 instruction set. Performace of the ARM11 is worse/MHz compared to Cortex-A8 iirc.

I blame ARM for confusingly naming their CPUs with numbers in such a way that it looks the same as their instruction set revisions. They changed their CPU designs to "Cortex" to get away from this.


ARM9 cores use ARMv4 or ARMv5.


ARM11 cores use ARMv6.


Cortex-A8 uses ARMv7a.


Note that each instruction set has various optional or not extension parts that are found as letters after the version number.


The core performance of Cortex-A8 is usually a lot higher per MHz than ARM11 because it's dual issue, has better branch prediction, and probably other things (but in some ways it's worse too). But most ARM11s don't have L2 cache, and I'd be very surprised if this one did. That hurts overall performance dramatically at these clock speeds and with the high latency memory/memory subsystems these SoCs are paired with.

 

[jbr]

I'm not really concerned with comparing Raspberry Pi to Pandora, because, well, yeah, they are pretty obviously different devices for different purposes.


The information in this thread about the comparative beefyness of ARM11 vs Cortex-A8 is useful, of course, but it doesn't factor in to my beliefs that both the Pandora and this new Pi thing are awesome uses of existing technology.


I would totally order this Pi thing for $25 if it ever became available, and I'd carry it on my keychain just for the sake of having a few more gigaFLOPS in my pocket.


Of course, I wouldn't be ditching my Pandora or my Droid just for its sake...

 

[Exophase]

I would totally order this Pi thing for $25 if it ever became available, and I'd carry it on my keychain just for the sake of having a few more gigaFLOPS in my pocket.
Of course, I wouldn't be ditching my Pandora or my Droid just for its sake...

Sorry but that thing won't even give you one GFLOP. ;p

 

[cubelindo]

Just imagine this thing with Mame in a mini-arcade. Total Winner!

 

[Eridger]

Oh man, guys! Have you heard about this Shiva Plug thing! The Pandora sucks when compared to it! Also, these laptop things? WAY faster than the Pandora! Also PSPs are super better than Pandoras.

 

[Adraen]

Edit: Removed (sorry)

 

[Giepi]

I sent some days ago a mail to this guy telling him that his minicomputer would REALLY suit better as a Emulator Console than a "educational" device. At least in a world where not every child will just start making hardware and games because he sees such a jewel. And I pointed out that it does exist a BIG and active community of developer that could make nice things if they got interested in that device. I gave openhandhelds as a proof


I think he must have took me as a lunatic, but it was just too nice (and cheap) to not do so