4 ms·
Before the Pi I'd bought a number of BeagleBoards over the years. I still have a few BeagleBoard xMs and original BeagleBones sitting around. The bone specific
by Teknoman117 5y ago
Before the Pi I'd bought a number of BeagleBoards over the years.
I still have a few BeagleBoard xMs and original BeagleBones sitting around. The bone specifically was super neat in that it had a ton of IO (PWM, A2D, encoder inputs, SPI, UART, etc.) that could be controlled by either the CPU or microcontrollers embedded in the SoC.
Problem is at this point I have no idea what to do with any of them. ARM CPUs got so much faster in such a short span of time that it feels like arm boards from a few years ago are kind of just junk today. There are many dirt cheap boards that are way faster than a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 (or the 700 MHz armv6 core in the OG Pi) available today.
- blippage 5y agoI've never owned a Beagle. I discovered earlier this year that they were open hardware and even had real-time capabilities. It struck me that this is what the Pi should have been. Then I saw the price. So I'll be sticking with Pis. It would be a master-stroke if the Pi gained real-time capabilities.
- Teknoman117 5y agoThe BeagleBone Black was $45 at launch (10 years ago, ouch), which was $10 more than the Pi B. At this point they certainly seem to have abandoned that price point. The first BeagleBone (the 'White') was $85, but it had a JTAG debugger embedded in it so you could actually single step through the Linux kernel if you wanted.
- schaefer 5y agoI share that sentiment. I'm so sad that the Beagle project doesn't come out with a CPU refresh.
- myself248 5y agoThe BBAI doesn't count?
- Teknoman117 5y agoSort of, but they tripled the price to take the CPU cores from 2010 (single A8) to 2012 (dual A15). I know the whole point of the BB is the real-time capabilities and the two DSP cores, but I do wish the application CPUs were faster. Now that there's compute support for the GPU in the Pi4, I wonder what the performance difference is (in AI stuff).
- myself248 5y agoThat's all fair. I love that the BB platform is so stable, I can design around it with reasonable confidence that my gizmo will still work in _another_ decade, which is a perspective only recently coming to the Pi world. But there are certainly sacrifices made in that approach.
- schaefer 5y agoBeaglebone AI was released: April 23, 2013. Considering we're in early 2022, no. I wouldn't call that a refresh.