3 ms·

I've always been so confused by the smallish amounts of RAM available on rPi's. Certainly, 1GB is more than enough for many applications. And obviously low cos

I've always been so confused by the smallish amounts of RAM available on rPi's. Certainly, 1GB is more than enough for many applications. And obviously low cost is a primary requirement.But a rPi with more RAM would open up so many more use cases - databases, Redis instances, various caching applications. If I'm not mistaken, there are quite a few other single-board computers (Beaglebone, Intel perhaps...) that offer more RAM. However, Raspberry Pis have a long lifecycle and excellent community, which is appealing. I think this must be a very deliberate decision on their part. It would make sense to me, I guess: their mission is clearly to serve the education and hobbyist markets and that mission would be compromised if they create something that IT departments begin to buy in droves.

Narishma 10y ago
I believe 1 GB is the maximum the SoC they are using supports.
derefr 10y ago
It's too bad there's no logical way to redesign the module to allow it to talk to an external memory module, while keeping its simple SODIMM form-factor. You could put some (much-slowed-down) memory on the SMI GPIO pins, though: you'd be able to access it "through" DMA to main memory, as if the CPU had a memory-banking architecture. (It'd probably only operate at a similar speed to that of eMMC, though; at that point, if you're running a regular OS, you may as well just put some Flash on the eMMC pins and tell the OS to treat it as a swap partition.) I think the "idiomatic" thing to do here, though, is to not think of the rPi as a computer that needs more RAM, but rather as a fixed amount of RAM with some compute attached. Want more RAM? Plug more rPis into your board and cluster them together into a NUMA "backplane" of rPi "blades", like this: • https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=144595 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=1445... • http://hackaday.com/2016/01/25/raspberry-pi-zero-cluster-packs-a-punch/ http://hackaday.com/2016/01/25/raspberry-pi-zero-cluster-pac... Some applications—an RDBMS comes to mind—wouldn't distribute very well on such a setup, but Redis would run quite nicely (and concurrently!) Of course, there'd still be some restrictions: you'd not be able to have a single key with >1GB size. But if your data-set is a power-law distribution with the largest keys being <100MB, it'd work great.
russellbeattie 10y ago
I just wish they'd put a damn real time clock and watch battery on the thing so it wouldn't lose time. It's like two chips... hell, I'd be happy to buy the battery myself.
khedoros1 10y ago
They're limited by how much RAM fits into one chip at the price-point they require and using an interface that their SOC can use.

Narishma 10y ago

I believe 1 GB is the maximum the SoC they are using supports.

derefr 10y ago

It's too bad there's no logical way to redesign the module to allow it to talk to an external memory module, while keeping its simple SODIMM form-factor. You could put some (much-slowed-down) memory on the SMI GPIO pins, though: you'd be able to access it "through" DMA to main memory, as if the CPU had a memory-banking architecture. (It'd probably only operate at a similar speed to that of eMMC, though; at that point, if you're running a regular OS, you may as well just put some Flash on the eMMC pins and tell the OS to treat it as a swap partition.) I think the "idiomatic" thing to do here, though, is to not think of the rPi as a computer that needs more RAM, but rather as a fixed amount of RAM with some compute attached. Want more RAM? Plug more rPis into your board and cluster them together into a NUMA "backplane" of rPi "blades", like this: • https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=144595 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=1445... • http://hackaday.com/2016/01/25/raspberry-pi-zero-cluster-packs-a-punch/ http://hackaday.com/2016/01/25/raspberry-pi-zero-cluster-pac... Some applications—an RDBMS comes to mind—wouldn't distribute very well on such a setup, but Redis would run quite nicely (and concurrently!) Of course, there'd still be some restrictions: you'd not be able to have a single key with >1GB size. But if your data-set is a power-law distribution with the largest keys being <100MB, it'd work great.

russellbeattie 10y ago

I just wish they'd put a damn real time clock and watch battery on the thing so it wouldn't lose time. It's like two chips... hell, I'd be happy to buy the battery myself.

khedoros1 10y ago

They're limited by how much RAM fits into one chip at the price-point they require and using an interface that their SOC can use.