Half more computing power, but also half more power consumption.
Is there a curve of power/frequency dependence, for under/overclocking?
What’s the minimum power the board can be run at, for battery-powered devices?
It figures… I just bought a Raspberry PI 2.
That’s cool and all, but:
Effectively the board became unresponsive in headless mode if it was connected to the network only via Wi-Fi...In the meantime, if you’re running the board headless remember to enable keep-alive in your ssh client or you’ll run into a similar problems.
...let's hope that's fixed soon.
There’s never enough of such controller boards. It will find its way to a smart TV, video streaming unit, 3d printer controller, or any of a myriads of other applications.
You know I will be buying a 3 the moment I can, still there is that moment when you see the headline and have that mix of excitement and irritation.
No need for the irritation, given the flexibility of even the ancient Pi 1 units. 
Phew. It still has an ethernet port (unlike the zero which was cool but, due to lacking an ethernet port, not for me). I’m looking forward to using a pile of these for my dev environment.
64 biiiit.
The built in wifi and bluetooth are nice but my immediate uses don’t call for it.
Here’s what it draws, (FTA)
My question is, can the power draw be forced lower with some nondefault powersaving techniques?
Though 600 mA at this power, or 3 watts, isn’t that much…
300 mA at idle is however quite a lot, if we’d want to run it from batteries for extended time.
Thought. What about using a raspi board as a core of a laptop? Could allow a pretty modular setup, with different displays to choose from ranging from various LCDs to potentially even e-ink, and swapping the core board for better once it gets to the market as the form factor is quite likely to be conserved.
Something like the Droid Bionic Lapdock?
I used to have one. It sucked ass. You get all the computing power of a middle-grade smartphone from 2012, and none of the power benefits of a laptop battery (it didn’t charge from the lapdock’s battery, the lapdock battery was just for running the monitor.)
If it didn’t want to share the big battery power, it was badly designed.
1 GB Ram-- but 64 bits.
Is there a point?
There’s a reason they stopped selling the lapdock bundle for the bionic about six weeks after it was released.
And even for its time, the Bionic was basically already obsolete by the time it was released.
The way the lapdock worked was that when you plugged your phone into it, a second partition on your phone started up a severely lobotomized version of Debian with a web browser and no way to access the console. You basically could browse the web, but that was it. No installing packages, no way to tinker with the Debian partition on the phone.
I ended up bricking it trying to make the lapdock useful.
Very wrong design then.
A floating one, perhaps?
Probably? There’s something to be said for 64 bit even without the RAM. If nothing else, it’ll be more likely to last through new development cycles.
I’d buy a Zero for battery use cases now. I’m more interested in the Pi3 revision of the compute module that’s supposed to be hitting in a few months.
Those things are actually really handy: Not for enjoying the, um, wonderful experience of one of Verizon’s crippled children from 4 years ago; but because you can actually construct an adapter that allows them to be used as a mouse, touchpad, HDMI display, speakers, and USB hub(all with built in battery) pretty easily.
A great alternative to lugging over a monitor, mouse, and keyboard for when you need to figure out why a machine that has been running headless is suddenly not talking to you anymore, or as a cheap, low-footprint, alternative to a fancy KVM switch.
The production values of my adapter…leave something to be desired…but at the time I went looking display model and old stock lapdocks were going for a song, so I’ve been very pleased with the ones I picked up.
It’s harder to justify for general-purpose mobile computing, since Core M ultraportables are pretty much exactly the same size and weight, and the newer ones have fun stuff like higher screen resolution; but great for the ‘crash cart’ and initial config of headless systems. (In that vein; has anyone ever built a laptop that had a video-in and the ability to expose its keyboard and pointing device as USB or PS/2 peripherals? It’d be a niche market; but a killer feature for anyone who wrangles rack-dwellers with any frequency.)
The Pi3 compute module would make a nice thing. Hell the slice with a p3-c would be kinda nice as a media player, certintly a lot nicer than it running the original pi speccd compute module.
As for modular laptops. SANDBENDERS HERE WE COME.
If memory serves, ARM made the move to 64-bit and the ARMv8 ISA revision at the same time, and ARMv8 includes a wide variety of 32-bit applicable improvements and fixes(which is why their 32-bit only Cortex A32 uses it, despite not even offering 64 bit capabilities much less shipping in anything with that much RAM).
That aside, I imagine that the reason was ‘Because the part Broadcom now offers us the best price on is an A53 based one; and we couldn’t fit another gig of RAM and wireless into our target budget’.
