So, the Raspberry Foundation have decided to give us a hugely overhauled version of the Raspberry Pi platform to play with.
The first (A and B) was great fun because we could do all sorts of crazy things with it, but it was a tad slow on complicated things and there were a couple of gotchas.
This new one, however, has loads of things that improves over the first version:
- Core Speed increase – version 1 had a single core ARM6 processor running at 700 mHz, but the new 2 version has a quad core ARM7 processor running at 900 mHz.
- 4 USB Ports with an overhaul of the USB Bus
- Memory increase from 256/512 mb (ver 1 A/B respectively) to the ver 2 having a full gig!
Some of that might not seem too big, the speed increase on the quick look of it seems quite small, but the realistic effect of it first being ARM7 along with quadcore means that the entire base (if supported by the OS codebase) can run far more complicated functions blisteringly fast whereby previously they were simply not available.
This is most notable in a simple side by side test in RetroPie.
Previously RetroPie would run up a Playstation one (PSX) game, but the sound stuttered terribly and there was all sorts of judder happening on the screens refresh rate.
Now however it just runs like it should.
Similarly on the LXDE Desktop, things are much better, I’ve installed Chromium-Browser (previously a pointless task, it would barely load, let alone render pages at any speed) and it just ticks along niceley. It’s not a HTML5 compliant browser yet, but I’m working on that 😉
There’s also some other nice-to-haves. The USB Bus overhaul means that hopefully minor annoying issues with USB attached devices (I’m looking at WIFI dongles here, notably) won’t reset on a cycle anymore, generally the USB Bus feels like a slightly nicer beast.
Other than that the Foundation don’t seem to have wandered too far from the original platform, the Raspbian distro they supply is for ver1 and 2, so at a low level they seem to be pretty similar (which is nice, shouldn’t have to re-learn too much).
Only gotcha I’ve found so far though is it’s slightly more power hungry than the ver1, if you see a pretty coloured square occasionally on the top right rendering over the top of what ever you’re doing (in the shell or in desktop etc) it actually means there’s not enough power and the Raspi is actually suffering a minor brownout! And thats BAD!
So yeah, we’re gonna need a bigger boat (by which I mean either a decent USB power brick of an absolute minimum of 1A or a powered USB Hub of an absolute minimum of 2A (3A preferred)).
Headstrong Solutions 