The Kingdom of Philtopia

Raspberry Pi launched a new model on Monday the Raspberry Pi 3. Today is Thursday just a few days after launch and I am quite happy that mine has arrived.

At first glance it looks identical to a 2 however there are a couple differences to note. The foundation logo has moved over a bit and there is now an antenna next to the USB ports for the built in wifi.

The Raspberry Pi 3 upgrades the CPU to a ARM v8 Cortex A53 that runs with no overclocking at 1.2ghz and with 4 cores that gives you a good chunk of power for the size and price. The RAM is still 1GB, I would have liked to have seen 2 or 4 but 1GB will still hold the fort.

The microSD card slot changed slightly and this threw me off for a couple minutes. It no longer does the spring loaded lock/eject so you just slide the card in and that’s it.

CPU

There’s tons of bench marks out there so I am not going to rehash it here but it is safe to say it’s significantly more powerful than the Pi2. In fact it is at the point where I’d actually recommend a heatsink because the device generates much more heat. You can still get away without one as some tests have shown and the device has built in precautions against heat however I like to err on the side of safe and functioning devices.

To test the CPU I ran it through some Dreamcast emulation and the improvement was significant. On the 2 the Dreamcast was playable but the sound was wretched and poppy. The Pi 3 on two games all the sound issues were gone and a 3rd they were significantly reduced.

Boot time is also drastically improved with the new device

Wifi

Not having to waste a port on wifi is fantastic! To me it’s like the Rpi3 came with a new feature and an extra usb port. However I suspect the drivers and firmware might need some tweaks. Connecting to the internet from the device seems to always work no issue but if you have any services like ssh or samba going into the Pi seems to be intermittently bad. It feels like the device sleeps the wifi and it takes 10-30seconds to wake it? If i hammer the device with pings it eventually comes back and stays up as long as traffic is active.

As it turns out this hypothesis was correct and the issue can be corrected with the following command:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off

Pop that into a boot script somewhere and you’re off to the races!

Bluetooth LE

Can’t really review this yet, drivers don’t exist but it’s another saved USB port if it works out.

Good times

So in a years time we have gone from ARMv6 to ARMv7 and now with the 3 ARMv8 that’s some impressive headway. I now have a Model B, A+, 2, 3 and hopefully at some point a Zero. It’s clear I enjoy the products as they have opened up computing and electronics to a new generation (including myself) so keep up the great work Raspberry Pi.