Just How Good Can a $25 Computer Be?

by Dennis Burger on December 29, 2011 at 12:26 pm

Sections: HTPC

Via Business Insider comes this story of an amazing little computer that sounds almost too good to be true. Dubbed the Raspberry Pi, this little Linux-based fella comes in two flavors: The Model A, which runs $25 and includes 128MB (yes, MB) of RAM; and the Model B, which, for $35, bumps the memory up to 256MB and adds a wired Ethernet port (network connectivity on the Model A is supported via a Wi-Fi dongle connected to the USB port).

Under the hood, it boasts an ARM1176 processor running “at 700MHz with some overclocking headroom,” and connectivity comes in the form of HDMI (audio and video), as well as a 3.5mm audio output and composite video (which positively sends me into fits of nostalgia for my old Commodore 64).

And while, yes, those do sound like modest specs, consider this: the source story has a video of the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3 at an impressive 1920×1080, and if this video from the official site is any indication, it doesn’t struggle a bit with 1080p video.

Add a keyboard (which, ironically enough, will probably cost nearly as much as the computer itself), and you’ve got not only a really neat little entertainment device, but more importantly, an incredible little first computer for underprivileged kids the world over. This positively kicks the crap out of the Apple IIe my class used to fight over in third grade.

“We don’t claim to have all the answers,” says the Raspberry Pi .

We recently heard that sales of the Rapsberry PI computer had been out on hold as the device had to go through quality control testing here in the UK, good news as the Raspberry PI Foundation has announced that the testing is now completed.

The Raspberry PIvhas now passed the quality control tests and can go on sale without any hardware modifications, which is great news for those people who are waiting to get their hands on the device.

As you may know, we’ve had periods booked in a testing chamber at Panasonic’s facility in South Wales for the whole week. Jimmy, Craig and Gareth from Gainspeed, our EMC consultants (with assistance from Phil the EMC lab manager, occasional assistance/hampering from Eben and the aid of many Asda sausage sandwiches), have been working into the evenings, and lost their Good Friday holiday to get all the testing finished. There is still a mountain of paperwork for us to sign, and that then has to be looked over by RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell; but that’s a piece of cake compared to what we’ve been doing all week. Given that we’ve had the chamber for the whole week, we’ve used the time to make sure that alongside the CE requirements, the Raspberry Pi also complies with FCC regulations (USA) as well as CTick (Australia) and what we’ve been calling “that Canadian thing”.

You can find out more information over at the Raspberry PI Foundation

What is Raspberry Pi?

The introduction of the £22 Raspberry Pi computer has caused such excitement that the firm has been forced to shut down its full website in favour of a more basic version to ration bandwidth.

Mini Raspberry Pi computer goes costs £22

The bare bones Raspberry Pi computer costs £22

The credit card-sized Raspberry Pi essentially consists of a circuit board, sockets for a keyboard, monitor and Ethernet cable, and an all-in-one “system on a chip” to do all the number crunching, graphics and memory work. The processor within the chip is based on the same ARM architecture found in Apple’s second generation iPhone 3G, which was released in 2008.