Category Archives: Opinion

Raspberry Pi Arrives

Posted on by Brian

I ordered a Raspberry Pi back in March (or was it the last week in Feb.) the day it was put on sale via Newark. I actually did it while I was at a conference. After what was a rather lengthy wait, it arrived just about 3 months later.

To be honest Beaglebone is more open source than Raspberry-Pi, it is also faster probably at least for general purpose stuff. What it doesn’t have though is HDMI on board or a price point of 35 dollars. You’ll need a 10 dollar SD card also so really 45 dollars is what a R-Pi costs to deploy.

For some things having real time access is more important for that Procyon and the ARM boards I build are better. They have a lot of resources and can do complex things like FLAC decoding, and they have pretty high memory bandwidth for a single task, again taking Procyon as the example it does 50 MB/s to SDRAM.

However, not having to do much but download a package of some complex library is a lot easier so I fully expect R-Pi to become the dominate internet electronic project gateway device for the DIY community.

I will likely be doing some add on boards for R-Pi, so stay tuned.

If you want some more of my thoughts on R-Pi in relation to use and hardware check out my post on Dangerous Prototypes’ forum.

The end of the CMOS era

Posted on by Brian

Talk to most technical people about the end of “Moore’s Law” and they will pretty much dismiss you. The typical answer being: “people have been saying that for a long time and it has not happened yet”. True but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Is the fact that the sun shines today and yesterday and the day before a promise that it will go on forever? No, of course it is not. Physics gets in the way of that, and so too with Silicon devices.

At the recent OHS summit Andrew Huang (AKA Bunnie) made some remarks about heirloom computers, and they have gained traction/notice elsewhere. While I don’t feel that consumer devices are made to be durable enough at this time to be heirlooms there may be a day when that becomes the case. But more likely than that we will see the amortization of the cost of a FAB driving down the cost of continued production of the same technology. It may be we are about to enter an era of disposable computers.

The truth is we can expect the end of CMOS to be here soon. Perhaps in as little as 5 years.

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