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Pros: The Raspberry Pi can’t be beaten on price, and it offers surprising power for its tiny size and power draw.
Cons: Software for the Pi is still very immature, while other – admittedly more expensive – devices are significantly faster.
More info: Raspberry Pi homepage
Version reviewed: Model B (£29)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have at least heard of the Raspberry Pi. Since the creation of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a not-for-profit charity created by Eben Upton and David Braben, the credit-card sized computer has rarely spent a day out of the press – despite delays caused by manufacturing issues and unprecedented demand.
The Pi’s problems look to be at an end, and customers are finally receiving their long-awaited boards – but does the device deliver on its promise of affordable, hackable computing in a tiny package?
It’s the size that first grabs you when you handle a retail-model Raspberry Pi. At 85.60mm×53.98mm it’s the approximate size of a credit card, and with a total weight of 45g it’s certainly pocket-friendly. Very few development boards offer the same power in as compact a layout, with the notable exception of the BeagleBone at 86.36×53.34mm.
A compact layout doesn’t mean a lack of features, however. The Model B variant of the Raspberry Pi, as reviewed, boasts HDMI digital video and audio output from a full-size connector, two USB 2.0 ports powered by an internal hub, a 3.5mm jack for analogue audio, an RCA connector for composite video, a 10/100M Ethernet jack and a microUSB socket for the required 5V power input.
Those are just the readily-accessible ports, too: the Pi also features a Display Serial Interconnect (DSI) header for connection to a smartphone- or tablet-style screen, a MIPI camera interface, and a 26-pin general-purpose IO (GPIO) header which offers UART serial, Inter-Integrated Circuit (IｲC) two-wire, Serial Peripheral Interconnect (SPI) and eight addressable general-purpose pins on 2.54mm male headers.
Notable in its absence is an IEEE 1149.1 JTAG connector for debugging. It’s not something that will cause end-users any heartache, but those looking to the Pi as a cheaper alternative to the likes of Qualcomm’s Dragonboard or Samsung’s Origen would do well to consider whether a development system can really live without it.
Another issue prospective buyers will need to consider is the SD card support. With no on-board storage, the Raspberry Pi is reliant on an SD card for its operating system. The faster the card, the better the system performs – but issues with the SoC’s bootloader mean that many Class 10 cards simply don’t work. As a result, users are advised by the Foundation to use a Class 4 or Class 6 card.
When the right SD card is chosen, the Pi is nothing short of a marvel. Booting into a customised build of Debian, compiled for the somewhat outdated ARM11 processor at the heart of the system, is surprisingly quick. Even loading a graphical user interface, via the lightweight LXDE desktop, is pain-free, although scrolling in the included Midori web-browser can be jerky on the more complex pages.
The Pi does show its shortcomings in benchmark tests, however. Running the SysBench CPU benchmark on the Pi results in a 95th percentile request time of 106.72ms, compared to a more reasonable 77.56ms on a Ferroceon 1.2GHz-based DreamPlug (reviewed back in issue 100).
In terms of its price-performance ratio, the Pi is hard to beat – and the sheer power of the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU makes it a great choice for multimedia tasks, especially where hardware accelerated decoding is supported.
That, sadly, brings us to the final negative of the review: software for the Pi is still at a very early stage, with many features missing compared to rival development boards. Now the systems are finally shipping to customers, however, that will change – and given the popularity of the project, expect to see rapid improvements in the coming months.
Verdict: 5/5
It’s easy to mark the Pi down for its lack of JTAG, underwhelming CPU and immature software – but to do so ignores the key advantage the Pi has over its rivals: price. Simply put, there is nothing yet on the market that comes close to offering the Pi’s functionality at the same price point.
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