pouët.net

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Well, nothing screams new demo platform to me quite as much as the raspberry pi, a $25 device that just needs a keyboard, mouse, display (erm, probably some kind of usb hub) and an SD card to get going.

The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 @ 700Mhz with 128MB RAM. A slightly upgraded model has 256MB and Ethernet on board. It also does h.264 decoding (I read that it does 1080p decoding, but I recall hearing that it might only do 720p).

It can demonstrably run Quake III at 1080p at around 20fps, but they do say there are a few issues to iron out in order to get it running a lot more smoothly.

More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mDuJuvZjI&feature=player_embedded

Looks like a very nice platform.

So it's basically a low-end PC?

It depends on your interpretation of PC I suppose, but yeah.

I do like the idea of a static platform though, it does encourage the optimisation discipline somewhat. :)

No, it's a low end smartphone :) (Not necessarily a bad thing!)

And yeah, I agree with rc. I code a lot of iOS stuff, and it's really good to have fixed hardware. You can optimise the fuck out of something and end up getting WAY more out of the hardware than you expected, and it's guaranteed to run on every device out there :)

One thing of slight concern from that angle: it's a "custom" gpu from broadcom. Sounds like it's reasonably quick, and supports ES 2.0, but it also sounds like it's not at all well documented..

i wondered when this will pop up =)
now go make a demo about it ;)

psonice: iOS is hardly a good example of fixed platform due to very restrictive OS.

pommak: hardware is fixed, except for the yearly updates. There's only one hardware spec for say an ipad2 or iPhone4, perfect example of a fixed platform if you ask me :) Open platform on the other hand - not so much.

Except that you don't have direct access to anything because of iOS making it's things between your code and hardware. Hell, you can't even know how much memory you can use.

If that thing is English / British / European why is the price in $? Anyway I would buy it for €17.5389364.

Pommak: it's still a fixed platform. (And you can find out how much free memory there is - it's just somewhat pointless, because you can ask for more and there's a high chance the OS will free some up for you.)

Thanks, but I don't like playing lottery in my fixed platform.

btw, I did say being able to optimise for the fixed hardware was good, not that it's the ultimate fixed platform ;) For that I guess you'd have to go for one of the older consoles, or c64/amiga/etc.

What I was getting at is that on iOS I've got my video processing engine running far, far faster than I expected. That's mostly down to being able to squeeze every last drop of performance out of it, and know that i'm not going to get complaints from somebody with a slightly slower machine somewhere. Plus, with only a single CPU + GPU to worry about you get to know the hardware a lot more intimately, and you learn lots of little tricks to get more performance out of it. You don't get that on say PC, because the hardware varies. You will get that on the pi, because the hardware is fixed (if the OS is more predictable, even better!)

knowing what you could do with that hw if it wasnt so hidden away, you're really missing out on ios. :)

Maybe, but I know what I'd be missing out on if I wasn't on iOS, and i'll take the money thanks ;) If it was a demo platform, it would be a different story, but commercially it makes plenty of sense.

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM PIE

ahah, yeah right... commercially i makes a lot of sense giving 30% of your revenues to Steve Jobs' cancer treatments!

Livers ain't cheap, you know? Or pancreas...

RaspberryPi, BeagleBoard, etc., are built on (excellent) ARM architecture, and of course, they are PC! :) - there is only one credible definition of PC: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#PC

Going halves with bittin perhaps?

Correctly spelled it's raspberry pie, what a fuzz...

Why not simply computer?

i will get one

looks cool enough for a home server