Jam today: Raspberry Pi Ram doubled
All boards now ship with 512MB
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has upgraded its credit card-sized computer: it now sports 512MB of memory rather than 256MB, but still costs $35 (£22).
Foundation founder Eben Upton promised that anyone who has an outstanding order will receive the upgraded board.
“Units should start arriving in customers’ hands today, and we will be making a firmware upgrade available in the next couple of days to enable access to the additional memory,” he pledged.
That may come as small consolation to the many would-be Pi owner still awaiting kit from RS Components - one of the Foundation’s two board supply partners; the other is Premier Farnell’s Element 14 - after placing orders with the company as early as June. Folk who ordered kit more recently have received their Pis.
RS has yet to respond to out request for a clarification of the order backlog situation. If you have an outstanding order, perhaps cancelling it and re-ordering would be the sensible way forward. ®
COMMENTS
Better late than never ;-)
I received one of the early batch of Pi's back in May (having got my order in seconds before RS' server tanked on the opening morning).
It's actually a pretty good performer - especially since I switched to the "hard float" version of Arch Linux recently - but the one hardware feature* that I think has always hobbled the Pi since I received it, has been the "low" memory" (256MB). There are ways to mitigate this - e.g. I run "lightweight" Linux apps, including the Fluxbox window manager - but you find the RAM filling up pretty quickly - Web browsing can be slow, and I have to enable a temporary swap file if I want to build an Arch software package (e.g. from the AUR).
I wasn't planning to go for a second Pi, but I feel I'll really have to give it some thought - 512MB could make a real difference to the machine, especially for desktop and multimedia use. Won't carp about "why not 512MB at launch?" - it's pretty clear they couldn't do this earlier, and I'm just grateful to the RPi Foundation for offering the upgrade.
* I emphasise "hardware" there - the biggest software tweak they could introduce, would be an accelerated X server which could take advantage of the Pi's 2D and 3D graphics hardware. That could take the machine to a whole new level...
Re: Incremental upgrades
Do you ever get the feeling on tech forums that when you make a joke you seem to be in the middle of a Aspergers convention?
Re: Better late than never ;-)
Accelerated X is underway - engineering time is being spent on it right now. I've guess by Xmas, but that is indeed a guess.
Re: Hmmm
Ordered my 512mb RPi @ 9.50 this morning. Despatch note received @ 11.43 for delivery tomorrow. On past form I expect Farnell to fufil on time.
I dunno who is the dumber - RS who obviously can't get their act together - or the whingers who complain about RS when they ignore advice to switch their order from other suppliers (not only Farnell) for next day delivery. Yes there was a period of 3 days last week when you could not get an RPi overnight. Now we know why ;-)
