Raspberry Pi Review!

Raspberry Pi Review!

Two words, Raspberry Pi. If you know what it means, nuff said. Anyone following the Raspberry Pi saga, knows the delays and hiccups in the products development and launch. With the recent announcement that the boards would finally ship, it was only a matter of time before reviews started popping up. Gareth Halfacree was nice enough to publish Raspberry Pi Review on the Model B @ Bit-Tech.net.

If you haven’t already heard of Raspberry Pi, it is a small ARM computer capable of high performance graphic. The Model B has a full array of I/O: HDMI, Ethernet, USB 2.0, RCA audio, Display Serial Connector and MIPI camera connector. It is powered by a Broadcom BCM2835 processor running @ 700 MHz with a VideoVcore IV GPU running @ 250 MHz. Onboard the Model B is a whopping 256 MB of Hynix LPDDR memory running @ 400 MHz. The memory is shared between both CPU and GPU. There also are reports of some users trying to overclock their Raspberry Pis. It appears that success ranges from nothing to about 300MHz gain.

A surprising take away from the article is how slow the Raspberry Pi is for day to day tasks. Perhaps my expectations were a bit high, but Gareth discovered programs such as Gimp took 87 seconds to load. It also appears that graphic hardware acceleration is a serious issue that will hinder even the most simplest tasks such as web browsing. Speaking of graphic hardware acceleration, most users I’ve seen are interested in the Raspberry Pis ability to playback 1080p videos. For $35 this is an extremely cheap and effective HTPC build. From Gareth’s review, it appears that most distributions for the Raspberry Pi lack hardware accelerated video playback. DOH! However, there are a few XBMC bundled distros out there, IE: Raspbmc.com.

Suffice to say the Raspberry Pi is rough around the edges. Probably a bit too slow for day to day use but that is not the goal of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Instead the Raspberry Pi Foundations “…want[s] to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere” and the Model B is a great start. For those of us looking to the Raspberry Pi Model B as a HTPC, it should be just a matter of time before this cheap, accessible, and programmable computer gets a strong distro with XBMC 1080p playback.

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