It's amazing how many "full operating systems" want to support something as weak as Raspberry Pi, and how many things can be done with it. I can't wait for Raspberry Pi to come to a more powerful architecture like ARMv8 (at relatively the same price-point) and see what comes out of that.
Raspberry Pi is weak only by very modern standards, Linux and the BSDs were first implemented on much weaker hardware. And NetBSD famously runs on a toaster.
The embedded world has seen a massive performance boost in the last decade, the raspberry pi would've looked like a supercomputer in the 90s...
My point is that while the raspberry is not very powerful by today's standards it still has all the features of a modern "desktop" system: an MMU, SIMD, USB, graphic acceleration to cite a few. The line between embedded and desktop architectures is getting blurrier by the year.
I agree with your general point, but while the Raspberry Pi has some SIMD instructions, they are pretty useless in practice. They are integer-only, only work on 32-bit registers (so you can only work on two 16-bit or four 8-bit values) and they are implemented serially on one lane (each clock, the CPU does the work on one of the values) instead of the parallel way SIMD is generally done.
Yes, my criticism of the RPi is that it is too powerful... You might as well just use a desktop PC. For learning purposes, something like a FIGnition is much better.
Learning what? How to program the kind of machine that's already been obsolete for 10 years?
I know a couple of people with RPis who are using them as "home server"-type devices. Those are useful, and more power certainly doesn't hurt. Whereas the people I know who bought them with some idea that they would "start hardware hacking" or some such sit there gathering dust.
Learning how hardware actually works. I learnt on the BBC Micro, a 32k machine running at 2Mhz, powerful enough to run interesting things, simple enough that you could understand exactly how it worked, the memory map, how IO actually happened, etc. A serial port is great for this; USB or Ethernet, not so much.
Yes, for learning, simple can be better. Years ago as a teen my understanding of the basics of assembly and machine language and how CPUs worked finally "clicked" when I was playing with a very simple software simulation of a 4-bit microprocessor. I think it was called "picoprocessor" or something close to that. While useless as a practical architecture, the concepts I learned in that simplified environment were then easy to apply to real-world systems.
> Learning what? How to program the kind of machine that's already been obsolete for 10 years?
The RPi really is a very powerful platform. It's not a desktop computer. There are real-world devices that run things far more complex on far slower hardware.
I am not convinced that a more powerful architecture is as interesting as a less constrained architecture. I'd rather have and independent USB and Ethernet port, a better analog sound output and a VGA port. A better motherboard might hold more value for hobbyist. Not sure if it can be done in the same price range though.
For $40, or whatever it costs now, it's pretty damn powerful. The beauty of the rPi seems to be its a nice middle ground between a media-capable mini-PC and a I/O port laden project boards like the Arduino or Beaglebone Black.
