Raspberry Pi vs Parallax C3
Oldbitcollector (Jeff)
Posts: 8,091
I'm another of the "Raspberry Pi" orders which now appear to be shipping sometime later this year.
It's got me thinking.. Perhaps there is some marketing lessons (good and bad) which can be taken away from this..
Compare Raspberry Pi with Parallax's C3 product.
Size:
Both are about the size of a credit card.
Video:
Both support AV, audio out as well as VGA
Storage:
Both use an SD card for primary storage
Operating System:
Raspberry PI uses Linux, but "standard" intel apps will likely be difficult to port.
C3 has no operating system to speak of, but only due to lack of development.
Availability:
Raspberry Pi is currently vaporware... No orders have been reportedly filled to date.
Parallax has the C3 in stock. Looks like around 80+ right now which could ship this afternoon.
Price:
Raspberry Pi is $35.00 (Ok, they did take $35.00, just no immediate joy)
Parallax C3 is $129.99 (but you can have one now)
Yes, I know that ARM and Propeller are completely in different realms, but Raspberry Pi has been over-promoted all over the web for the last year+. Now that orders can be placed, it looks like it'll be another 6 months until anyone actually has one.
It looks to me like the only difference between the two is that one was marketed and the other is still a secret.
Hey Parallax.. How about a "Didn't get your Raspberry Pi Sale?"
I'll bet in reality there are a LOT more Propeller apps which would make it do awesome stuff if folks had some directions.
BTW.. Happy Pi day!
OBC
It's got me thinking.. Perhaps there is some marketing lessons (good and bad) which can be taken away from this..
Compare Raspberry Pi with Parallax's C3 product.
Size:
Both are about the size of a credit card.
Video:
Both support AV, audio out as well as VGA
Storage:
Both use an SD card for primary storage
Operating System:
Raspberry PI uses Linux, but "standard" intel apps will likely be difficult to port.
C3 has no operating system to speak of, but only due to lack of development.
Availability:
Raspberry Pi is currently vaporware... No orders have been reportedly filled to date.
Parallax has the C3 in stock. Looks like around 80+ right now which could ship this afternoon.
Price:
Raspberry Pi is $35.00 (Ok, they did take $35.00, just no immediate joy)
Parallax C3 is $129.99 (but you can have one now)
Yes, I know that ARM and Propeller are completely in different realms, but Raspberry Pi has been over-promoted all over the web for the last year+. Now that orders can be placed, it looks like it'll be another 6 months until anyone actually has one.
It looks to me like the only difference between the two is that one was marketed and the other is still a secret.
Hey Parallax.. How about a "Didn't get your Raspberry Pi Sale?"
I'll bet in reality there are a LOT more Propeller apps which would make it do awesome stuff if folks had some directions.BTW.. Happy Pi day!
OBC
Comments
It's hardly vapourware, it exists, which is more than be said for Prop 2 right now!
I bet you get delivery of your Pi before your P2
What is true is that it has been a worldwide phenomena with demand far outstripping supply.
Not bad for a small start-up charitable organisation.
It's a good thing for computing in general I think, I will get some for my children to learn programming on but I'll also get P2 as well......:cool:
I like the C3 its a great platform, it's expensive but what isn't these days....... Oh, wait a minute!
Coley
I look forward to seeing which of RasPi or P2 will be available off-the-shelf first, 'cause that's how I've decided to approach both of them. There is no need so pressing that I care to arm wrestle others for first dibs.
What shall we wager? A P2 chip?
OBC
@OBC, I'll take that bet so long as it's production models that are on general sale not one you managed to prise away from Chip ;-)
And, it will have to be a Pi as the prize I think....
(CPC who are part of the Farnell group will be selling them soon and they have a rather large warehouse just a couple of miles from my home :thumb:)
Coley
Yes.. It will have to be a production unit from the Parallax... I've already ordered my Pi, so now it's a race..
(Common Chip... Don't fail me on this!)
OBC
It's interesting to compare to the Zipit2 some of us got excited about last year - for $50. Apart from running *nix the Zipit had a display and keyboard, case with Lipo battery charger and MiniSD card, and WiFi.
To me the amazing thing is, is a that a small charity operating on a shoestring was able to come up with the Pi and get it into production and by mere dint of luck generate the sort of interest in it that money can't buy. I think they'll do quite well once they get production ramped up.
I think the C3's real competitor will be the Fez Ceberus mainboard priced at $29.95 with the 168 mhz Cortex M4 processor. The software is currently in Alpha testing but once it goes gold it will be a very nice low priced but powerful controller board.
That is a very strange comparison you want to make there. The Pi and C3 are
completely different animals. Like comparing a Ferrari to a tractor just because
they both have wheels and consume gas.
I have to take issue with a couple of phrases in your post:
That sounds very negative. Like it does not exist and will never exist and is
all just hype. Is the Prop II "vaporware"?
It's true that we may have a hard time getting hold of some Pi but it's only
just out of the gate and demand has dramatically exceeded expectaions.
What I see is a rather unassuming web site for the Pi. The fact that interest
has been huge is hardly "over promoting". They seem to have been very straight
with presenting their plans.
There is one large area of commonality between the Prop and the Pi. That is the
educational motive. The idea that youngsters or other non-programmer types
should have the opportunity to discover the wonderfull world computing, control,
algorthms etc etc.
The Parallax approach is to kindle curiosity and fire the imagination by way of
providing a means to interact with the real world, with sensors, robots etc.
The Pi seems philosophy seems to be somewhat more abstract.
Which makes me wonder what has been going on in education since the mid 1970's.
For example, in relation to the Pi I read things like this:
Good grief, this all sounds like the BBC computer and the big push for
computing in schools in the early 80's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
Is it really so that 30 years later no progress was made and we have to start
again with efforts like the Pi?
The Propeller is 'fully deterministic' and the Raspberry Pi is NOT. But the Raspberry Pi is supposed to offer HDMI for those that need the really smooth graphics. Just thing of all those schools saving money on the Raspberry Pi and then discovering they need to provide expensive monitors.
Something just doesn't add up about this. Is there really a VGA output as well?
Yes, there are NTSC and PAL and LCD outputs.
Simply put, the Propeller C3 will allow you to quickly deploy to a wide variety of educational venues. It can be used a simple bench tool or it can be provided with a variety of interesting OSes. The Raspberry Pi requires a solid background in Unix/Linux to really get started - even with Python.
I also noticed a comparison of the raspberry pi and the zipit2. Zipit2 must be hacked, hardware is weird, not gurarnteed to work for repurposing, pretty case gets in the way of final use. Pi is designed to be made to fit final use, its a design element rather than a candidate for hacking, and design to eleimiinate all non-critical costs. It's baby workstation, tiny, yet still designed to do workstation like functions.
The C3 is not designed to be a workstation. Maybe a terminal at most. It has lots of hardware options for memory, and they are cool, but without software, it just a bunch of possibilities. The way to make the C3 more "popular" is to create the software that "does" something lots of folks want. I'm actively working on software to make the C3 into a complete stand-alone PropForth development station, but really, there's only 73 people that are going to want that. Unfortunately, thats as far as I go.
In the meantime, I'm happy to keep my bet with Coley.. I have faith that Chip is winding down to the final steps to getting the P2 in our hands.
OBC
Tick........... Tock........... :cool:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17703852
and our own TonyD has received one:
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,101259.msg762041.html#msg762041
The whole reason the RPi is so popular is: "$25 Linux box!!!!OMFG!!!" It was promoted as a dirt cheap Linux box, and people can't say no to an uber cheap product. It's the whole Walmart mentality that is driving the feverish demand for these boards.
Meanwhile, in a galaxy far-far-away, the Beagle board is available for $80 at Adafruit, and it was the groundwork that allowed the Rpi to be developed. TI designed the Beagleboard and documented the process for everyone else to learn from. Using .4mm pitch BGA chips isn't as easy as .5mm BGA chips, it turned out there was a whole new process that needed to be developed for the .4mm process.
http://www.adafruit.com/category/75
It needs quite a lot of stuff adding to it to make it equivalent to the BeagleBoard, or the Pi. The Bone has a higher performance ARM chip than the Pi, though.
Under $50 is a significantly different dynamic, than under $100 is, and under $20 or $10?
I do not own a C3 because of that price. Truth is, looking back, I've bought a number of things that would easily add up to that price though. My point isn't that the C3 fails to be worth the money. It is all about "knee jerk", "I want to play with one of those" and where that all falls out cost wise.
In terms of features, I think the more common scenario is somebody seeing a desirable feature, then looking at the cost and their projects / desire to learn / entertainment time, more than it is raw specs.
Then there is accessibility. Lots of great discussion on that one, so I won't start it again, other than to say the C3 may well be seen as not as accessible as the Pi is.
For me personally, I like the idea of having "a real computer" at that scale. $50 is a steal! At some point when production levels out, and I'm motivated, I know I'll get a Pi for the purpose of interacting with Propellers, just because I have an interest in doing that.
When P2 shows up, it's going to have the scale possible to do similar things, though not likely at the Pi pricing. Somebody should really think about that, and the dynamics of "Under $50" vs "Under $100" Price aside, it's likely to have a similar appeal, if packaged that way.
Ray
Chip said Spin will need to be modified to fully take advantage of the Prop 2, and perhaps a few new language constructs (like structures) will creep in.
PASM won't change, other than the new instructions. The "hard" limits at this point are 126KB of RAM, 2KB ROM, 180Mhz "official" speed. Chip guesstimated that the Prop 2 would run up to 250Mhz in good conditions, more in ideal conditions.
-dan
Otherwise I don't believe you lost the bet yet.
Coley:
How's your PropGFX coming along?
Prop2 is coming down to the wire, Pi is still moving forward.. It's an interesting horse race...
OBC
Going back to your first post, what on earth is a "standard Intel app"?
I have been living in a Linux world since 1997 and pretty much every program I know and love will run on the Pi given it has enough speed/RAM/storage for it to make sense.
I'm not sure I have used an "Intel app" since the early 1980's when we used their PL/M compiler and other tools for the 8085 and then 8086.
The difference between a machine like the Pi and the Prop 1/2 is that I can develop code for the Prop on the Pi but not the other way around.
The original comparison is like comparing a Hugo and a racing go-cart. One has all the things needed to be licensed as an automobile but the other let's you bolt goodies onto it and not worry about the license.
In my case, the it will by RPi + protoboard first, then RPi + demoboard, then RPi + C3. The right tool for the right job.
In fact, it may even turn out RPi + bare propchip, since the the total cost could stay below $50US. All the software pieces are ready, they just have to be stuck together.
As it turns out we've pushed P1 far, far beyond that original vision, and that has pushed P2. But there's one thing about P2 you might want to remember; it will natively support fast external data memory. Memory not as fast as Hub RAM, much less Cog RAM, but very fast compared to say SPI RAM. And it will support LOTS of this native fast external RAM with lots and lots of pins left over for general purpose I/O. Now imagine that you put not just any data, but byte codes in that fast external RAM. Not too impressed? Imagine that the byte code language has the support of helper routines not limited to 2K Cog RAM, but living in 190+K of Hub RAM.
No, it won't run Linux and making it run something that looks like C will be a challenge if it's worth doing at all, but with proper code design there's not reason to think it won't be every bit as fast as a single-core 160 MHz machine with megabytes of RAM. Most application code doesn't need to run fast, and P2 will have plenty of Hub RAM for that which does. And P1 will remain attractive for lower power and lower cost applications. Raspberry PI or BeagleBoard may run circles around a C3, but how do I convert their HDMI ports into more serial ports when I need those instead of video? Oh that's right you can't do that. With the Propeller(s) you can.
As for the PII, it's not here yet, it's vaporware for all intents. But when Parallax has the silicon and does head to head comparisons say with the major ARM vendor offerings, then it'll be different.