This morning, I experienced the nerd equivalent of a Black Friday $50 iPad sale. At 07:00 CET, the first batch of the much-anticipated Raspberry Pi went on sale, and while Raspberry Pi itself was very properly prepared, the two large international retailers actually selling the device weren't - despite warnings from Raspberry Pi about the enormous amount of traffic that would come their way, the two sites crumbled to dust within seconds. There's good news too - the cheaper model A has seen its RAM doubled at no additional cost.
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Member since:2006-05-18
Yeah, I was thinking about the RAM, it's a bit on the low side considering that it's also shared with the GPU. Also I don't think that the 700Mhz CPU is good enough to do 720p software video decoding. Does the Pi have any built-in codec support?
But anyway, this is less important. Considering the massive success this thing is about to have, there will surely be a Model C with specs along the line of what you said. I can't wait 
Member since:2009-02-19
The GPU on this thing is actually quite good, as far as cell phone GPUs go.
The SoC on this thing was actually designed as a beefy mobile GPU, with a low-end CPU tacked on for good measure.
So, media and 3D rendering will be excellent despite the slowish CPU (and, my understanding is that everything in the OS land is open source, too - the binary blob runs on the GPU itself).
Member since:2005-06-29
Read the specs, it can handle 1080p at 30fps quite smoothly. There's a ton of video proof on Youtube as well. The GPU is the real gem of this device, apart from the fact that the driver is (currently) a binary blob. Broadcom has hinted at opening it up to developers at a later date, probably when the next iteration is released.
Edit: Sorry bhtooefr, I guess I type too slow, I didn't see your post until after I sent mine. 
Edited 2012-02-29 11:36 UTC
Member since:2005-07-11
Have a look at the Cotton Candy. Same basic idea as the Raspberry Pi, but it's a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU, Mali-400MP GPU, 1 GB of RAM, and microSD support up to 64 GB for storage. Onboard HDMI (full-size), USB (full-size), and micro-USB port. It's currently over $100, but give it a bit and the price should come down.
Member since:2012-02-25
Member since:2005-07-13
There's the Pandaboard and the Pandaboard ES. They are (a lot) more expensive than the Raspberry Pi, but have a lot more goodies onboard: Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi, I/O connectors, serial port, 1GHz (1.2GHz on ES) dual-core TI OMAP4 series, etc.
Take a look at http://www.pandaboard.org/
There's also the Beagleboard, also more expensive: http://beagleboard.org/
Edited 2012-03-01 15:59 UTC
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Member since:
2006-01-04
Debian and Fedora are already running on it.
I really hope these below $50 computers really catch on. Today they are still a little bit underpowered, but I guess by the end of the year we will have 1GB of RAM and a 1GHz+ dual core. (this http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ goes in that direction)
Most Facebookers don't need a big computer. A lean mean LXDE ARM box with a mali GPU will be just fine for most people. We can turn off a few nuclear power plants and don't dump that much into landfills if this is the future of computing. (Not to mention all the bad influence MS and Apple have, they won't be as powerful anymore)