Pi vs BeagleBone-Black

Spring greetings to you all ...  this thread has brought me out of my forum sabatical, naughty naughty.

Seeing the Slashdot thread on BeagleBone Black made me warp over to here post haste, as I guessed you would all be talking about it ... and you were, hehe.  I agree with everything that's been said.

Two additional bits of information that slightly change the picture:

• Farnell UK says "18584 will be available for delivery on 3 May, 2013", so they're clearly taking this seriously and expect BB Black to sell in much higher volumes than the first BeagleBone.  No surprise of course, price is king.
  

• The BeagleBone's TI Sitara AM3359 contains a pair of integer-only realtime processors running at 200MHz, the Programmable Realtime Unit Subsystem or "PRU".  These can provide waaaaaaay better hard realtime interfacing performance than any program running in Linux user-space, so for hardcore techies who aren't afraid of getting their hands dirty with some pretty simple assembler, the BeagleBone is lightyears ahead of the Pi in interfacing capability.

Success has very little to do with engineering merit though, so I won't be making any guesses about how popular this new board will become.  However, for myself, the Pi Model B is now totally dead in the water since it lost its only advantage, which was price.

Needless to say, BeagleBone Black is on my shopping list as soon as they're in stock.

Morgaine.

Spring greetings to you all ...  this thread has brought me out of my forum sabatical, naughty naughty.

Seeing the Slashdot thread on BeagleBone Black made me warp over to here post haste, as I guessed you would all be talking about it ... and you were, hehe.  I agree with everything that's been said.

Two additional bits of information that slightly change the picture:

• Farnell UK says "18584 will be available for delivery on 3 May, 2013", so they're clearly taking this seriously and expect BB Black to sell in much higher volumes than the first BeagleBone.  No surprise of course, price is king.
  

• The BeagleBone's TI Sitara AM3359 contains a pair of integer-only realtime processors running at 200MHz, the Programmable Realtime Unit Subsystem or "PRU".  These can provide waaaaaaay better hard realtime interfacing performance than any program running in Linux user-space, so for hardcore techies who aren't afraid of getting their hands dirty with some pretty simple assembler, the BeagleBone is lightyears ahead of the Pi in interfacing capability.

Success has very little to do with engineering merit though, so I won't be making any guesses about how popular this new board will become.  However, for myself, the Pi Model B is now totally dead in the water since it lost its only advantage, which was price.

Needless to say, BeagleBone Black is on my shopping list as soon as they're in stock.

Morgaine.

These can provide waaaaaaay better hard realtime interfacing performance than any program running in Linux user-space,

There are also several real-time Linux kernel patch sets (Xenomia is one) that can provide way better real time (hard and soft) performance running in "RT" user space than anything running

in "normal" user space. They also supply full RT APIs to work with and hardware (when available) supported floating point if you need it. Any RT kernels avaialable for the PRUs ?

  If finding a cubieboard is a problem, you could take a look on Ebay at the Mele A1000 media player

I bought one off of Ebay several months ago which is one of the reasons I'm not as interested in the Cubieboard as I use to be. It does have wi-fi and Ethernet and although it is bit short on the

user I/O it does also have serial, I2C (have to add a header), IR remote control and a SATA 2 interface. There are several web sites that provide Linux for the A10 and it already comes with what

I think is an Android OS for the media player operation.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Spring greetings to you all ...  this thread has brought me out of my forum sabatical, naughty naughty.

 

Was wondering where you'd been hiding recently

• Farnell UK says "18584 will be available for delivery on 3 May, 2013", so they're clearly taking this seriously and expect BB Black to sell in much higher volumes than the first BeagleBone.  No surprise of course, price is king.
  

 

However after getting an 'in stock' notification from Newark (strange when I'm in the UK), Newark now show 0 in stock and more expected to ship on 28th June - no qty listed...

So I'm not holding my breath just yet.

Success has very little to do with engineering merit though, so I won't be making any guesses about how popular this new board will become.  However, for myself, the Pi Model B is now totally dead in the water since it lost its only advantage, which was price.

 

I'd hoped to see something like this where the price difference (in the UK anyway) is approaching zero. Regardless of the merits of each device, it'll be interesting to see what happens next.

selsinork wrote:

 

I'd hoped to see something like this where the price difference (in the UK anyway) is approaching zero. Regardless of the merits of each device, it'll be interesting to see what happens next.

With the price disincentive gone, it'll be great to see comparisons on engineering merit with Raspberry Pi Model B.  The Pi still has a technical advantage in media playback, but that is the only advantage that comes to mind at present, whereas at first glance it seems to be below par in every other technical respect compared to BeagleBone Black.  Detailed comparisons would really be useful.  Perhaps we can do that on the eLinux wiki.

My interest isn't in media playback but in computing, networking, home automation, embedding, and hardware interfacing, so Pi's media bullet points don't float my boat.  However, it's undoubtedly the case that the masses think otherwise, and good media handling for $35 is what really sold the Pi in vast numbers.  Plus the hype.

Interesting days ahead.  I hope many other manufacturers join in the fun at this price point.

Morgaine.

I've started adding information on BeagleBone Black to the eLinux wiki BeagleBone page.

> With the price disincentive gone, it'll be great to see comparisons on engineering merit with Raspberry Pi Model B.

Such unbiased comparisons of engineering merit may be difficult to produce.

If you say the BB clock speed is greater than the RPi, you may be met with the

objection that the RPi can be overclocked to the same clock speed. 

If you note the RPI's overclocking potential, you may be met with the objection

that overclocking does not always succeed, and may result in damaged SD cards.

If you note the risks inherent in overclocking, you may be met with the objection

that the risks are overstated and that overclocking the RPi is not actually risky.

If you say the BB is faster, and therefore better for educational purposes

involving computationally intensive tasks such as IDE's and web browsing,

you may be told that programming should be learned on a slow machine

in order to teach the importance of optimization.

If you say the BB has better voltage regulation, you may be told that it should

be the responsibility of the power supply to regulate it's own voltage output.

If you say the BB works with a wider variety of keyboards without dropping

or repeating characters, you may be told that debugging hardware problems

builds character and is a valuable learning experience.

Hahaha. 

Indeed, the values system of fanbois is a glory to behold, and doesn't obey any known physical laws.

Fortunately as engineers we can just enumerate the facts that can't be disputed, except by fanbois of course.  And even engineering value judgements of comparative merits and demerits can be given in an NPoV manner as well, and reasonable people will often find them useful, fanbois excepted of course.

At the end of the day, we can only do our best using the engineer's normal methods of analysis.  Once we've solved world hunger and poverty, then maybe some brave soul will tackle much harder problems like blind fanboism.

coder27 wrote:

 

> With the price disincentive gone, it'll be great to see comparisons on engineering merit with Raspberry Pi Model B.

 

Such unbiased comparisons of engineering merit may be difficult to produce.

If you say the BB clock speed is greater than the RPi, you may be met with the

objection that the RPi can be overclocked to the same clock speed. 

If you note the RPI's overclocking potential, you may be met with the objection

that overclocking does not always succeed, and may result in damaged SD cards.

If you note the risks inherent in overclocking, you may be met with the objection

that the risks are overstated and that overclocking the RPi is not actually risky.

 

If you say the BB is faster, and therefore better for educational purposes

involving computationally intensive tasks such as IDE's and web browsing,

you may be told that programming should be learned on a slow machine

in order to teach the importance of optimization.

 

If you say the BB has better voltage regulation, you may be told that it should

be the responsibility of the power supply to regulate it's own voltage output.

 

If you say the BB works with a wider variety of keyboards without dropping

or repeating characters, you may be told that debugging hardware problems

builds character and is a valuable learning experience.

I'd say your bias is pretty clear too.  Why don't you wait for real responses instead of just making them up ? Here's a few for now.

16 bit memory data bus vs 32 bit for the Pi. Well at least it uses DDR3 vs. DDR2 for the Pi. That will not make up for the lack of bus width though.

The power management chip used by the BeagleBoard Black also uses low dropout voltage regulators for one of its 1.8V and one of its 3.3V supplies. Bad engineering eh Morgaine ? Built

right into the chip from TI no less.

The documentation for the real time PRUs is sorely lacking in the AM3359 Technical Reference Manual, 2 pages and no useful hardware description at all. Not even a block diagram. A search

on the TI web site produces only 5 hits all related to forum questions. At least the questions in the forum hint that there is access to better hardware documentation. The PRUs in the 3359 are

an upgrade to an existing device so the documentation may still be be "in the pipeline". They are mostly aimed at providing support for industrial real time communications protocols although

they apparently (no documentation) can be used for other purposes. The only software tools for it is an assembler which is not yet released for public use although mainly due to efforts at

BeagleBoard.org it is supposed to be by the end of this month.

The GPU is a proprietary design by PowerVR, which means at least for now, no open source drivers. It supports an OpenGL ES API same as the Pi so X11 hardware acceleration support is not

likely for it either. At least it is a few generations ahead of the Pi.

No built in camera interface.

Edited (again) to add:

It has been my experience that overclocking the CPU does not cause data corruption on the SD card, overclocking the memory does. I had one Pi (out of three) all running with 1 GHHz overclock

that did corrupt data until I changed memory timing from 600 MHz overclock to 500 MHz and have not had a problem with it since. After that I changed all of them to 500 MHz to be safe. Note

that I used the phrase data corruption which is an accurate description as opposed to damaged the SD card which is not.

On the plus side for the BB Black:

Lots more, and more useful I/O.

16 bit LCD interface.

More modern ARM architecture.

From Morgaine:

  Indeed, the values system of fanbois is a glory to behold, and doesn't obey any known physical laws.

Fortunately as engineers we can just enumerate the facts that can't be disputed, except by fanbois of course.  And even engineering value judgements of comparative merits and demerits can be given in an NPoV manner as well, and reasonable people will often find

   them useful, fanbois excepted of course.

At the end of the day, we can only do our best using the engineer's normal methods of analysis.  Once we've solved world hunger and poverty, then maybe some brave soul will tackle much harder problems like blind fanboism.

Yea, these are real good arguments from an normal engineering methods standpoint. Good to see that name calling hasn't fallen out of your favourite responses after your long absence.

Gary, evidently you didn't grasp what was being said.  My reply to coder27 was about all fanbois, not just Pi fanbois.  That includes BeagleBone fanbois and all other fanbois as well, because fanboism has no redeeming properties for technical discussion at all.

The technical criticisms that you have presented are very good and useful.  Such observations need to go into the engineering comparisons which are sure to be made between the two boards, and I certainly welcome them.  Knowing and understanding the downsides of any device I use is very important to me.

You seem not to have noticed that I pointed out that Pi Model B still has the lead for media playback.  I pointed this out despite the fact that I personally do not use that feature, because it is a technical feature of great importance to many people and it must be mentioned in any balanced engineering assessment.  I mentioned it because I an not a fanboi of any device nor manufacturer, and any valid engineering assessment must list both pros and cons.  Everything has both pros and cons.  The mark of a fanboi is to praise the pros and deny the cons of his or her precious, and my remarks were directed against that ridiculous lack of objectivity.  I would hope that you would agree with that view..

This is an engineering forum.  Let's try to stick to engineering assessment, and leave fanboism to others.

Gary Stewart wrote:

 

The power management chip used by the BeagleBoard Black also uses low dropout voltage regulators for one of its 1.8V and one of its 3.3V supplies. Bad engineering eh Morgaine ? Built

right into the chip from TI no less.

 

Did you catch the table in the BBB SRM showing power consumption ?   I was very interested in the Kernel Idling Display Blank figures of 280mA @ 5v, my Pi shows ~410mA in the same condition. So something is doing a better job.

Do you have any information on whether LDO3&4 outputs are configured as LDO's or Load Switches ?  I couldn't find anything and I'd like to understand where the differences are, but I think we can safely assume these LDO's are not the same as the 1117's on the Pi. Whether that's the source of the difference or something else is more difficult to ascertain. 

I've replaced both the 3.3v & 1.8v LDO's on a couple of my Pi's with switchers based on a TPS54231 and can get down from 410mA to approx 295mA so this has me interested.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Gary, evidently you didn't grasp what was being said.  My reply to coder27 was about all fanbois, not just Pi fanbois.  That includes BeagleBone fanbois and all other fanbois, because fanboism has no redeeming properties for technical discussion at all.

 

The technical criticisms that you have presented are very good and useful.  Such observations need to go into the engineering comparisons which are sure to be made between the two boards, and I certainly welcome them.  Knowing and understanding the downsides of any device I use is very important to me.

 

You seem not to have noticed that I pointed out that Pi Model B still has the lead for media playback.  I pointed this out despite the fact that I personally do not use that feature, because it is a technical feature of great importance to many people and it must be mentioned in any balanced engineering assessment.  I mentioned it because I an not a fanboi of any device nor manufacturer, and any valid engineering assessment must list both pros and cons.  Everything has both pros and cons.  The mark of a fanboi is to praise the pros and deny the cons of his or her precious, and my remarks were directed against that ridiculous lack of objectivity.  I would hope that you would agree with that view..

 

This is an engineering forum.  Let's try to stick to engineering assessment, and leave fanboism to others.

Your repeated use of fanbois in Rapsberry Pi forums as well as the explicit use of Raspberry Pi fanbois on several occasions, and your use of it on more than one occasion when

it was simply not appropriate (see next sentence) makes it clear what you mean. The entire content of the "fanboi" post was clearly lacking any of the objective engineering

assessment you insist on from everybody else and in no way contributed useful engineering information or even interesting opinion to this forum which makes the last two

sentences of yours quoted above seem rather strange (not my first choice of words).

It is clear from my post that I already have a firm grasp on the concept of pros and cons, how you missed that I do not know.

I didn't miss anything in your post(s), I just didn't find it germane to what I was responding to.

As far as fanbois in these forums go there are a few, but I find you use the term more often than is warranted by their actual presence. In this case none have been present so

far so why did you feel compelled to use it ? As far as it goes I accept them as a fact of life and rarely find the need to call them out. I just tend to ignore them. Doing anything

else is a waste of time because they don't listen anyway and ignoring them does not "feed the beast".

Now if you don't mind I will attempt to go back to useful engineering assessment mode.