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SnowballSnowballPosted Feb 8, 2012 10:17 UTC (Wed) by mjr (guest, #6979)In reply to: Update: Nope, no video data by GhePeU Parent article: Upton: Raspberry Pi: Two things you thought you weren’t going to get
Yeah, that's not bad for what you get, though as you said, a bit in a different category than Pi. There'll probably be more variety in Mali boards too before the Lima driver (hopefully...) matures, towards the lower end too. For anyone willing and able to hack towards it Snowball seems nice now though ;)
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Snowball Posted Feb 8, 2012 14:17 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
The project to watch is actually this one: http://rhombus-tech.net/
Their chosen CPU for "mass market" purposes also supports the Mali GPU architecture, so I imagine that if they continue to make progress, we might see sufficiently open hardware in a similar price bracket in the not too distant future.
Snowball Posted Feb 8, 2012 22:12 UTC (Wed) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]
Yeah, that *looks* great, but the thing is RPi has much more convincing story/people behind it. History is filled with projects/companies that don't deliver.
RPi has convinced me, I believe them when they say that they will ship next month. Other projects need to do a lot of trust building before I take them seriously. That rhombus-tech site is filled with great visions and lofty goals, but no real price or shipping date. I certainly don't believe the 15$ price.
Snowball Posted Feb 9, 2012 14:11 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Sure, Raspberry Pi has a few names you've heard of behind it - that potentially raises other "trust issues", depending on which names are the ones you recognise - but having read a bit more background and having met one of the main players in a different context, I don't see the Rhombus Tech people giving up so easily. I also respect the fact that they're surveying and documenting the hardware landscape rather thoroughly. You also see this going on, perhaps in a slightly less coherent or convenient fashion, around other open hardware initiatives, so even if the stated project doesn't work out there is a body of knowledge that others can work with. As for the "convincing story" behind Raspberry Pi, aside from reservations about such devices being the right vehicle for teaching computing concepts (in what amounts to a replay of the microcomputing era), I see a lot more enthusiasm from bystanders for a potential source of cheap media centre hardware than for the stated educational goals. In addition, it's still a single vendor show: creating an open standard doesn't seem to be part of the agenda (which would arguably be one of the lessons to learn from the microcomputer era). Since the hardware aspect of Raspberry Pi is also communicated largely as a done deal, alternative initiatives seem more attractive to me because they potentially widen the competence of the community and make it more likely that we'll be able to maintain access to a range of devices friendly to Free Software, rather than depend on vendors cutting one-off deals.
Snowball Posted Feb 9, 2012 19:28 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
if you can run linux on it, hardware standardisation is less important. In fact having different groups offer hardware with different capabilities, but all able to run linux, seems like a good thing to me.
Rhombus tech Posted Feb 11, 2012 17:52 UTC (Sat) by justincormack (subscriber, #70439) [Link]
The Rhombus Tech project is much more of a community project. If you want to help make it happen then join in.
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