10 ms·
Raspberry Pi Compute Module
- Zuph 12y agoI'll be interested to see how this progresses. With any luck, it'll open up a market of cheap, well-distributed SOMs, similar to the Pi opening up a market for cheap, well-distributed ARM/Linux Dev Boards. The situation's surprisingly similar: Powerful ARM Dev boards existed before the Pi, but the price was steep, they couldn't be found in traditional distribution channels, and the OS/Driver support was poor at best. This is, more or less, the place we're at with embedded SOMs.
- ris 12y agoYou really see these being sold in Radio Shack? With Pis, all the average person needed was a regular keyboard, mouse & monitor to plug in. That's why it worked. That's all been thrown out here.
- Zuph 12y agoNope, I don't see these being sold in Radio Shack. The world of electronics distribution reaches way beyond Radio Shack. I mean: Before the Raspberry Pi, there were Linux-capable ARM Dev Boards, but the vast majority of them were niche items, over $150, and you had to call up the manufacturer and convince them to sell you one. (oh, and don't you dare use this in production without securing a larger purchase agreement!) Now, there's a proliferation of sub-$100 Linux-capable boards being sold by all the distribution houses, in large quantities, with no or limited restrictions on use in production. I hope this move from the Raspberry Pi foundation does the same thing for OEM SOMs. Right now, there are only a handful of SOMs on Digikey/Mouser, most with fewer than 100 units in stock, all (that I can find) over $100, with zero community of support. Most of the companies with strong reputations in the market require a phone call before they'll even agree to sell you units for sampling.
- ris 12y ago"Before the Raspberry Pi, there were Linux-capable ARM Dev Boards, but the vast majority of them were niche items, over $150... Now, there's a proliferation of sub-$100 Linux-capable boards..." If anything started this it was the BeagleBoard released by TI well before the Pi. You can get a feel for how much influence it had from the fact that half the boards released these days are named *Board in a similar way. MinnowBoard, CubieBoard, DragonBoard, OwlBoard, MarsBoard, Arndale Board, PandaBoard, CosmicBoard... I could go on... I'm no Raspberry Pi hater, but let's just not go all history-revisionism here.
- peteforde 12y agoI think you're gravely misunderstanding the intended goal and target user for this device. It's not "for consumers" but a path for hardware developers to prototype with a full Pi and then ship with a custom unit that's been configured as needed - without having to modify your code.
- ris 12y agoRight, but what I've said in other replies, why can the Pi do this any better than any of the existing SO-DIMM modules on the market?
- fit2rule 12y agoHere in Austria, at least, any Conrad's has a "raspberry pi accessory" shelf. Sure, its Conrads .. but then again its Conrads. That is about as Big Mac Consumer as you are going to get. I know of at least a few other places, here in Vienna, where you can get an rPi pretty much any time of day by vending machine. wtf, you're still using Radio Shack, lol.. ")
- MrMeker 12y agoThe normal RaspberryPi is available at Radio Shack. http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=28925486 http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=289254...
- jnbiche 12y agoMy local Radio Shack carries both Arduinos and various Propeller microcontrollers, along with sundry components for them (LCDs, wifi, bluetooth, etc). It also sells various breadboards and some really cool individual integrated circuits (hex and other logic gates), MOSFETs, CMOSs, and bunches of other cool stuff. And I'm not in a huge city or in California. If you're into hobby electronics, it's worth checking out Radio Shack if you've not been in one for a while. They carry much more than just electronic kits for kids. But I agree that the target market for these is more professional engineers looking to take a prototype into smalltime production, or an early protype into something more refined.
- fit2rule 12y agoThere are really great cheap SOC's out there, in ARM land, to play with. Just look at these guys: http://www.acmesystems.it/aria http://www.acmesystems.it/aria Look, the rPi started off as a play-thing for kids, and there is now a valid rPi generation. It is expanding as a platform. But: in the industrial world, the rPi is a small fish. You can get an rPi precisely because some other industry has already driven the demand/price/costs down for it to be affordable/profitable to build a new brand around what is, a common industry practice/device mind-set.
- tcas 12y agoThere are, but they aren't close in specs and price to this one. The AT91 series are completely different in terms of functionality vs the Broadcom. The AT91SAM9 series don't even have a floating point unit last time I checked. This chip can do full 1080p h264 encoding/decoding/and support that resolution for display output (HDMI and DSI). This also has flash storage and 2x more ram onboard. This might be a close equivalent, but is more expensive, and will almost certainly require a large order to get those prices: http://www.variscite.com/products/system-on-module-som/cortex-a8/var-som-am33-cpu-ti-am335x-am3354-am3352 http://www.variscite.com/products/system-on-module-som/corte... If this brings down prices of the commercial SoM vendors that benefits all of us however.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- idlewan 12y agoI could see this being a really interesting way of having a slim and upgradable raspberry-pi-powered tablet. Year after year, you could upgrade the SoC and memory while keeping your case+screen+screeniopcb+batterypcb+battery.
- zokier 12y agoYou might be interested in EOMA-68 project. They have similar ideas, albeit using proper HW instead of RPi
- ris 12y agoIsn't the Pi incredibly underpowered for use as a compute node?
- kragniz 12y agoIt depends what you want to use it for. I'm imagining this being used in small embedded projects where the physical size of the current Pi is undesirable.
- ris 12y agoBut there are plenty of SODIMM-sized ARM embedded modules with much more compute power than the Pi already.
- Narishma 12y agoAnd they are also probably a lot more expensive than $30.
- ris 12y agoI wouldn't say a lot.
- vardump 12y agoHow do they rate against Videocore IV? AFAIK, ARM core represents only about 2-5% of total computing power in RPi. And can you provide some links, please?
- ris 12y ago"Total computing power" is massively load-dependent. And I don't think The VideoCore IV is massively outstanding in the field of embedded GPUs. Links? This is turning into a let-me-google-that-for-you, but they appear very regularly on http://linuxgizmos.com http://linuxgizmos.com
- 12y ago
- Maxious 12y agoKind of like a modern swyft card, eh? http://hackaday.com/2014/04/06/vcf-east-the-swyft-card/ http://hackaday.com/2014/04/06/vcf-east-the-swyft-card/
- fhars 12y agoNo, not at all. The swyft card war more or less just a ROM cartridge for the Apple II
- malanj 12y agoWow - SODIMM form factor is a game changer. A few years back I built a bunch of robots with the main processing unit a SIMM Java processing module - http://www.systronix.com/tini/tini_simm.htm http://www.systronix.com/tini/tini_simm.htm. Having a standard (and super compact) form-factor for processing was a game changer. It meant I could quickly prototype the main robot board and add in processing module really easily. I wish I had this available then.
- milliams 12y agoHow would people compare this to Improv? http://makeplaylive.com http://makeplaylive.com http://aseigo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/introducing-improv.html http://aseigo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/introducing-improv.html
- zokier 12y agoFirst impression: Improv has still all those bulky connectors on it. Second impression: It costs twice as much as the RPi module.
- makomk 12y agoI think those connectors are on the detachable baseboard, not the processor board.
- zokier 12y agoIt seems you are right. In that case it is more comparable to this RPi module. The price difference stands though, if you can't get the processor board separately significantly cheaper somewhere.
- fit2rule 12y agoI'm a little disappointed that this isn't a compute-addon for the rPi that gives it some serious calculation power. Ah well .. guess I'll stick to the IMX platform for that ..
- jnbiche 12y agoWell, the existing RPi's GPU has 24 GFLOP capability, which is roughly the same as the GPU on the baseline i.MX6 (the Vivante GC2000). Now, a lot of that capability has historically been unavailable to RPi users, but they're slowly responding to pressure and opening up the GPU. But I also saw the headline and was hoping for some nice little GPU compute add-on the RPi. Oh well. I still think this is a very promising form factor for the RPi.
- samstave 12y agoDoes the compute module have the GPU on it? Or is it on the connector board?
- astrodust 12y agoIt's pretty nuts that a tiny little thing like this has gigaflops of compute power.
- jnbiche 12y agoI agree -- I know it's silly but I still marvel at the fact that the $10 microcontroller I'm working on has almost the processing power of the laptop I used in college in the 90s (and in the case of the RPi, vastly more).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- vidarh 12y agoThere's pretty much zero chance of that.
- chrisBob 12y agoThe SODIMM form factor is interesting. I know in this case they are just using it because the connectors are easy to come by, but are there any examples of a computer designed to fit in a RAM socket and do processing rather than just statically storing the memory information?
- ris 12y agoPlenty. Read LinuxGizmos http://linuxgizmos.com http://linuxgizmos.com (nee LinuxDevices) to keep abreast of them.
- brucehart 12y agoThis is a somewhat common form factor for embedded processor development boards. Critical Link has a whole line of products like this: http://www.criticallink.com/product-cats/system-on-modules/ http://www.criticallink.com/product-cats/system-on-modules/ .
- astrodust 12y agoI recall one processor upgrade for a 1990-era Mac that slotted into the L2 cache slot, back when L2 cache was on the motherboard and used a similar DIMM format. It was extremely unusual, but apparently worked.
- bcohen5055 12y agoI had one of those... it was installed on a IICI, I think it was manufactured by sonnet tech and it was marketed as a PPC upgrade card for the motorolla 68040 Here is a list of all of the sonnect upgrade cards and how they connected http://www.everymac.com/upgrade_cards/sonnettech/ http://www.everymac.com/upgrade_cards/sonnettech/ Edit: Added link
- astrodust 12y agoYeah, that was the one. I had a hard time tracking down the proper link, but it's on the page you linked: http://www.everymac.com/upgrade_cards/sonnettech/crescendo_g3_l2/crescendo_g3_l2_500.html http://www.everymac.com/upgrade_cards/sonnettech/crescendo_g... It's clever and insane at the same time. Most processor upgrades physically replace the processor, but this one just bypassed it.
- maguirre 12y agoIt's about time they put some FLASH on-board. SD card has proven time and time again an unreliable medium. You never know if the device would boot up after a "dirty shutdown"
- tomswartz07 12y agoPersonally, I liked the SD Card method. It allowed me to keep a few cards with different OS images on them, and quickly swap them out when I wanted to change what the device was used for. It might be a bit more difficult with the built in storage, but I suppose it's nothing that can't be managed.
- atmosx 12y agoYes but say I need to run a rails application with a DB on a Lan (less than 15 users), perfomance is not an issue (nginx + postgresql + puma uses less than 115 MB of RAM!) The only thing stopping you is SDCard's reliability! A friend of mine had two unrecoverably broken Kingston class 10 SDCards on the same RPi in 6 months. Bad luck maybe, but still I'd love to have something more solid to run applications without fear of data loss.
- learc83 12y agoYou can setup the SD card to run read only, and use a external usb hard drive when you need to write.
- tcas 12y agoThis is very interesting in regards to a having cheap Linux SoM (system on module) for businesses to use in their products as well, by far the cheapest I know of with these specs. Doing routing and verification for a chip like that is no easy task. I'm really curious to see if the foundation will commit to a product lifespan / availability for commercial use. If so this could become pretty big. Obviously if you are selling a product in 100,000s+ you will probably roll your own, but for a small business to produce a niche product that's going to be sold in the high hundreds, or product a proof of concept this is awesome. EDIT: rereading the blog post, this is aimed at commercial use, definitely great in regards to pricing, however, I wouldn't want to base a product on it without a guarantee of availability / compatibility from them. The Beaglebone black specifically says that they don't guarantee compatibility between revisions for this reason.
- ausjke 12y agoNone of these ideas or practices are true, but indeed RPi is selling these used-to-be-EE-only to the public, which is great!
- cpwright 12y agoI wonder how much an RPi compute + the dev board, will be compared to an RPi Gertboard to get at all the interesting bits of the processor.
- coreymgilmore 12y agoVery interesting. Definitely makes integrating the Pi into projects a lot easier. The form fact will help with making things smaller and reducing a lot of external connections (gpio breakout, Gertboard,...). I'm interested and ready to buy!
- alexandros 12y agoThis is the answer to the question of how to move from prototyping to production with the Raspberry Pi. So far the answer had been to either deploy (and pay for) a bunch of peripherals you don't need (applications most certainly don't use everything on a board) or to move to a different/custom board. With the compute module, that answer is now much more concrete. People will still build own boards, but most of the complexity will live on the SOM. Very exciting times, can't wait to see if the gambit pays off.
- JimmaDaRustla 12y agoI wonder what type of applications will come out of this. For example, I want to build security cameras with Raspberry Pis, but I don't need audio output, USB, HDMI, etc...but I would need WiFi, camera unit, and power. But I doubt we'd see custom IO boards for specific applications such as this, and I don't think it'd be any cheaper than just buying a regular Pi.
- mschuster91 12y agoWell, just custom-build a PCB. Either laserprinter-etch it yourself or use one of the maker services. If you're just after USB (for the wifi) + camera + power, you don't need that many pins so you can solder the SMD SODIMM socket even by hand.
- Ellipsis753 12y agoLooks really cool but I'm slightly disappointed to see that when buying these Compute Modules in bulk they still each cost about the same as a single full Raspberry Pi (Version A). The Compute Modules do have 4gb of built in flash that the Version A doesn't have though.
- ebenupton 12y agoAnd an additional 256MB (512MB versus 256MB for the Model A).
- wyager 12y agoIt looks like the module plus the I/O board costs $30 in large quantities. So aren't you really getting pretty much the same deal? I'm sure the modules alone will be cheaper.
- harpastum 12y agoNo, from the article it appears the module by itself will be $30. With the I/O board the price will be higher: "...the Compute Module will be available to buy separately, with a unit cost of around $30 in batches of 100"
- apawloski 12y agoSo for many distributed computations in my field (pretty much anything that isn't embarrassingly parallel [0]), the limiting factor is often network communication -- how quickly nodes can send messages to each other. Even as just a toy, putting an affordable arm chip with a serious interconnect would be a really big deal. This is a great step closer. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel
- timthorn 12y agoThe Calxeda ECX-1000/2000 would have been ideal for you then - 4x10GbE interconnects with a quad core A9/A15. Shame they went under - but there are alternatives from Marvell, Applied Micro and others. Look for ARM server chipsets and you'll usually find a good fabric attached.
- justincormack 12y agoYou will also find a large price tag. And probably inability to actually buy one alas.
- timthorn 12y agoYou can get the Mirabox based on the Marvell Armada 370 for about £150, one-off. Includes dual 1GbE. Eg http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/All-MiraBox/MiraBox http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/All-MiraBox/MiraBox
- justincormack 12y agoThat's not really server class, more a consumer product.
- Timmmmbob 12y agoThis is quite badly named and isn't intended for number-crunching. It's for when you want to use a RPi in a project, but want it smaller or better integrated into your other electronics. Think about a kiosk, or digital signage.
- kelmop 12y agois this now viable for cluster? I mean simple backbone for 20+ for these with combined network and power unit? is there still any point at all?
- papaf 12y agoIt would make a nice cross between a dedicated server and a virtual server. You could rent out 20+ "nodes" where each node is a dedicated computer with low performance.
- noonespecial 12y agoThe price is getting better but it's still in the "I used my pi for the project" vs the "I used a pi..." range. Things get interesting when a general purpose Linux computer reaches disposable pricing where you just pull a new one from the bin for each project. This feels like about $20usd or less to me.
- Touche 12y agoSo what happens to all that e-waste when you throw out an old computer board because you don't feel like wiping it?
- simik 12y agoPatiently waiting in a trash field for a future entrepreneur genius who would devise a way to extract on the cheap anything and everything useful from it.
- noonespecial 12y agoUnfortunately, we have that already and it looks like this: http://www.occupyforanimals.org/uploads/7/7/3/5/7735203/__9508423_orig.png http://www.occupyforanimals.org/uploads/7/7/3/5/7735203/__95...
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y agoWell with this system on memory footprint, if my application doesn't need Ethernet I won't add one to the board, and if I don't add one to the board then the jack and chip won't be wasted or e-wasted.
- ris 12y agoYou're making project-specific one-off PCBs, and you think this is less wasteful/more efficient than "wasting" an ethernet transceiver?
- noonespecial 12y ago
- wmf 12y agoI wonder if they're working on a RPi II; in the two years since its introduction I'd hope you could get a lot more for the same price.
- KerrickStaley 12y agoCan this be plugged into a DDR2 DIMM and allow host<->Pi communication (with an appropriate kernel driver)?
- csense 12y agoThe article says: > But don’t go plugging the Compute Module into your laptop – the pins assignments aren’t even remotely the same! So the answer is "no."
- astrodust 12y agoSounds like doing this will let out the magic smoke in a hurry. Do you think they've fused it so it doesn't short out and trash any board you put it into by mistake?
- bronson 12y agoSeems unlikely. Fuses, MOVs, and clamp diodes cause signal integrity issues (especially at 3.3V and under). And, for 200 lines, the cost might be impressive. That said, if the Pi foundation can arrange for all the I/O to come out of reset in a hi-Z state, then there's a chance they could arrange the rest of the pins to avoid damage. But would it be worth the effort? Given how hard it is to access most sodimm sockets, mistakes seem rather unlikely.
- astrodust 12y agoIt's like how people used to mistakenly plug their modem phone cord into a PBX jack and fry their modem because the voltages were way higher. Having it show up as an unrecognized DIMM would be clever, but perhaps not worth the trouble.
- agumonkey 12y agoBeside high-end SMP, is there a system where you can buy computing modules to extend the, well, compute power of your 'machine' ? cpu as daughter boards, like the rpi compute module.
- ryanmk 12y agoCan other computer-on-modules in a SODIMM package be used in the Compute Module IO Board they are developing? I've searched online, and I think the boards that the SODIMM modules are plugged-in to are called "base-boards" or "carrier-boards". In general, are these kinds of boards generic in nature, so that you can mix-and-match modules with different carrier-boards, as long as they all use the SODIMM package?
- kbaker 12y agoNo, usually each manufacturer has a custom pinout for the SODIMM connector, they are not interchangeable. For that you may want to look at the Qseven standard: http://www.qseven-standard.org/ http://www.qseven-standard.org/ This also gives you a bump in processing power as well, with the ability to use ARM or x86 processors. (of course it is a lot more expensive...)
- bronson 12y agoYay, they are putting onboard flash! That's going to make the Pi way more reliable. But boo, no more clock or memory. Lots of apps bump gracelessly into the 512M limit (libre office, IDEs, OpenElec+plugins, ...) 1G should give all of them enough breathing room that they don't need babying them all the time. A little more grunt to the CPU would have been nice but that's minor. Overclocking the Pi seems mostly futile -- it just lets the CPU spend even more time waiting on I/O and cache.
- learc83 12y ago>Lots of apps bump gracelessly into the 512M limit (libre office, IDEs, OpenElec+plugins, ...) The compute unit isn't meant to be used as a desktop, but as an embedded system.
- hatfieej 12y agoIt kind of bothers me that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is supposed to an educational charity, yet they are devoting resources towards developing products aimed business and industrial users. It doesn't seem aligned with their stated mission.
- erbo 12y agoFrom the announcement: "We are also aware that there are a very significant number of users out there who are embedding the Raspberry Pi into systems and even commercial products. We think there needs to be a better way to allow people to get their hands on this great technology in a more flexible form factor, but still keep things at a sensible price." "The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity, and as with everything we make here, all profits are pushed straight back into educating kids in computing." In other words, they found a need, they're filling it, and all the profits from filling that need will be plowed back into their primary mission. More money = more kids educated in computing = Good.
- deserted 12y agoAny ideas for a cheap source of SODIMM sockets?
- Alphasite_ 12y agoRS/Farnell i guess?