Two new Raspberry Pi models emerge steaming from the oven The Raspberry Pi Foundation has baked two new Pi. The new “Compute Module 3” and “Compute Module 3 Lite” are re-shaped versions of the Raspberry Pi 3 and are intended to give developers of embedded devices a way to use the RPi as the basis for their designs, without having to accommodate the rather bulky Raspberry Pi design …
"Are they going to make sufficient quantities of these"
As the Compute Modules are designed as a mainstream commercial product for industrial scale use, yes they will be available in large quantities. That's kind of the point of them.
"My experience of selling hardware based on a Zero does not endear me to further use of RPi products for my next venture."
You're using the wrong product then. The Pi Zero was produced as a sideline for a (supposedly) small hobbyist market. It isn't mainstream at all and wasn't designed for people who wanted to market products around it.
One would think if the clocks are mentioned you might also mention that there are 4 cores, they're 64 bit, there's a better GPU. You know, for completeness.
But then comment posting on the forum is still hosed as well, so... Sigh. Your ad network or whatever appears to be locking the page until it completes a very slow media load on detection of a mobile browser. Which is counter to the general tech-savvy nature of the site. Aspiring to be the next Yahoo?
It's a proper PC on a SODIMM. What a wonderful world.
Your ad network or whatever appears to be locking the page until it completes a very slow media load on detection of a mobile browser.
It's almost as if they *want* you to block ads, isn't it?
That's one of the major pains with all this bespoke targeting - it means a site needs data on demand, and if ad networks are more bothered with flogging ads than make sure sites can get hold of the ads, the user will find yet again another reason to block them. If the data was NOT targeted, you could at least cache some of it.
The BCM2837 chip in the Pi3 does run very hot under load, which will be a challenge for some embedded uses. It's a shame the Pi2 chip (BCM2836) is no longer available, as that is the coolest running of all the variants at idle, and delivers good 4 core performance at reasonable temperatures, even when over-clocked to 1GHz. The Pi2 which is now being sold contains an under-clocked Pi3 chip and has WiFi and Bluetooth deleted.
Concur.
I tried to build a DIY timecapsule for off-site backups using it. It was quickly reaching 70C under load and starting to go all funny - processes dying, fs corruption, etc. Even clocking it down did not help.
I ended having to replace the of Pi with a Banana for this reason. No thermal issues ever since. In fact, given a choice between the new Pi and a Banana I would always choose a Banana - significantly more reliable, especially for apps which do a lot of network or USB work.
To be fair, that's a pretty good way of describing an issue whose symptoms aren't repeatable. I had a similar experience with my first Pi, which was powered from a USB hub. It had a 2.5" hard drive connected and the current draw was well within the limits of the hub's supply. Worked fine for ages, then "went funny" - devices going offline, resets etc. Tried a different hub and drive, which worked fine until eventually the same thing started happening. Now I use a 3.5" drive with its own supply and the Pi is on a phone charger supply. All is well.
My biggest wants are USB3 and Gig Ethernet. The Odroid XU4 seems to be the only thing out there that does this but seems to be a bit overpowered for my needs. I know this isn't what the Pi is for so I don't need anyone to point this out. I know it's for education and bandwidth isn't a priority. But I'd be fine with the CPU and RAM of my Pi 1, but better connectivity. I could live without HDMI too - rarely use it.
I might just plump for the XU4 unless anyone has any other suggestions. I use Slackware on my Pis, and am happy enough building my own kernel so I can have root on btrfs.
Have you seen the Orange Pi Plus 2?? It has wifi, gigabit ethernet and sata.
CPU is a H3 Quad-core Cortex-A7 H.265/HEVC 4K. 2GB DDR3 ram. USB is only 2.0, unfortunately (four USB 2.0, one USB 2.0 OTG).
I've bought a couple to play with..
See https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Orange-Pi-Plus-2-H3-Quad-Core-1-6GHZ-2GB-RAM-4K-Open-source-development-board/1553371_32516755321.html
I bought an orange pi (still in the post from China) but from all I've read I'm wishing I hadn't.
Sounds like still very flakey support in the mainline kernel so most are using hacked 3.something kernel.
Also, although it has twice as much ram as a pi 3, it uses, as you mention a cortex a7 to the pi3's cortex a53 which from all I can tell absolutely smacks the little a7 to pieces.
You've quoted the lie the xulong keep repeating about the chip being 1.6ghz. It's not.
It's 1.2ghz,
1.6ghz is a factory overclock on their own dodgy linux distribution.
The SATA port sounded like a nice idea for a little file server but the SoC doesn't support SATA so it's just a little USB to SATA bridge built in which apparently performs horribly compared to the ones you' get in your average external USB hard drive.
So worse hardware, more expensive, less software support, mali gfx that will never make it to the kernel.
If I knew what I know now, I wouldn't have bothered ordering one.
@ Bodge99
That looks decent. Lack of USB3 is a pain but it does have SATA2. Do you know if that can get the full 3Gbit/sec bandwidth? Probably good enough for an external HDD.
The biggest problem with the Raspberry Pi is everything hangs off the same USB hub, so writing data across the network to a connected USB drive gives pretty basic throughput. Fine for streaming videos across the network but if you have a lot of data to copy it can be quite painful.
*edit @ jbuk1
Thanks for the info. Using a USB to sata bridge makes it pretty much pointless for me. I expect it's a decent board for playing with, but I use my Pi as a central server - NAS, DLNA, VPN, DNS, DHCP proxy etc etc. All that consumes about 100MB or RAM when idle and 2 GB of storage for the OS. I could probably get that down a bit (another Pi I have does bluetooth audio and little else - 40 MB RAM and 300 MB storage)
Of course, everyone's needs are different. Mine are very little CPU and RAM, but I'd like some bandwidth please.
I'm happy with my Bulgarian Olimex boards, no USB3 yet, but gig-ethernet whilst cool & silent running.
I used the SATA interface for rotary HDD without problems, stuck a LiPo on as nano-UPS. can run Android or Debian. [Cortex-A7, DualCore, 1GHz, DDR3 1GB, 4GB NAND] ~75$/€/£
https://www.olimex.com/Products/SOM/A20/A20-SOM-EVB/open-source-hardware
https://www.olimex.com/forum/index.php?board=30.0
Burma Shave! We date ourselves a bit.
I still remember the sequence of little red signs along the road to my grandparents' house in Wisconsin.
"In this world
of toil and sin
your head grows bald
but not your chin.
Burma Shave."
And fifty years later, I've found that they were right.
This post has been deleted by its author
A very serious question.
What would you use the Compute Module for? It seems very underpowered to me, but no doubt somebody will come along and educate me.
I have looked around and can't see any good justification for it. I'm sure it wasn't manufactured on a whim but I'm genuinely interested in how it could be or is being used.
Thanks
Rob
Seems like an ideal platform for embedding it in industrial systems. Could be used for someone practising his cluster building skills. Whatever your imagination can come up with (Being a Mech. Engineer mine is rather limited when it comes to this type of equipment)
Hi Rob,
There are any number of IoT applications that don't require masive computational power. Bluetooth based information beacons in 'smart' cities could be one application. Another application that I know Compute Modules are being used in is digital signage.
I hope that helps.
"I think that the word 'Compute' threw me."
I have a little box at home that measures sunlight, temperature and humidity and then computes the duty cycle of my greenhouse watering system. It definitely computes. It uses a couple of kilowords of ROM on a PIC, most of which is lookup tables. A Pi would be massive overkill.
Any 64 bit microcontroller is capable of serious computing, and the ones in our phones exceed, I believe, the first few generations of Crays. Modern hearing aids are capable of acoustic processing which would have had Alan Turing screaming in frustration had he been able to foresee it while working on his telephone encryption system.
Most computing, by function, is not about image processing, which means that an awful lot of function points can be squeezed into very little space.
also bear in mind a lot of industrial systems still use serial interfaces, and often require optoisolation and/or unusual electrical interfaces so you probably need custom electronics for that - but if beyond that you can then read a 9.6k serial link, and decode some (seriously wacky) proprietary protocols, you've got quite a few areas in which the Compute may be of use ...
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