$25 PC Prototype Gets Award At ARM TechCon 238
New submitter gbl08ma writes "The Raspberry Pi project, which aims to create a $25 Linux box, won an award for the category 'Best in Show for Hardware Design' at ARM TechCon, even though they haven't yet released any final product (the release will be sometime in late November). Eben Upton demonstrated the capabilities of one of the prototypes that have been built. From advanced graphics at 1080p resolution to simple web browsing and desktop productivity, the small boards with ARM-based processors and PoP SDRAM have proven to be very versatile, fast and durable."
Re:This is an enabling technology.... (Score:2, Informative)
It doe 1080p just fine. The SoC on the RaspbetrryPi is the same one that powers the Roku2. The RPI supplies a hardware accelerated OpenMax implementation. It will even come with licenses for the codecs.
There's a name for that already (Score:2, Informative)
A cluster of Raspberries is called a "Bramble"
Sheesh!
Keep up, can't you?
Re:First to repeat it in this story (Score:5, Informative)
The project's been covered on Slashdot, what, four times now? And people still don't understand what the target market is!
This is not aimed at the third world (although I am involved with a project in Tanzania that's considering using them if we can get a FreeBSD port), it's aimed at UK schools. When I went to school, we had BBC Model B computers and a couple of BBC Masters. The A and B nomenclature of the Raspberry Pi is directly inherited from the original BBC micros, because they are intended to fill exactly the same niche: teaching kids how to make computers do what they want. Modern computing in schools has drifted too far towards teaching kids to do what the computer wants.
When you turned on the BBC, you were in a programming environment. Actually a fairly powerful one: a dialect of BASIC that supported structured programming, direct memory manipulation via PEEK and POKE, and a built-in assembler (i.e. everything you needed to write a JIT compiler, although I never did).
You also had a range of I/O capabilities, including analogue input and digital input and output that could be read or written to trivially, just by reading or writing the relevant memory address. These machines had just enough abstraction that they weren't totally intimidating, but it was thin enough that you could push (POKE?) through it and see exactly how things were working. That was what made it a good teaching machine.
The original BBC Model B cost about £300, in 1981s money. Accounting for inflation, you can give every child in the class one of these to play with for the price of buying the BBC B for the classroom back in 1981.
Re:Where can I buy one? (Score:2, Informative)
Liz from Raspberry Pi here - unlikely you've "seen this Raspberry Pi thing a few times now over the past few years", given we only went public in May of this year. Still, we're thrilled that we've managed to excite you so much that we've created some sort of awesome time dilation effect in your mind. No, we're not vapourware.