Found this...

http://makezine.com/2015/02/02...

And even if not, hopefully the faster and quad-core CPU will be able to respond in a more timely manner?
As they would have had to do a new layout for the SoC, I hope it was another aspect that was fixed in the redesign.

The ARM Cortex A7's in the new Pi have Neon.

But yes, ARMv8 is a significant clean up on old ARM cruft (usually exposing too much of the underlying hardware in the ISA, or design decisions that in the long term weren't as useful as they seemed at the time (like a 4-bit predication field in the ISA)).

It's just that there aren't any $5 ARMv8 SoCs available right now. I'm sure in a year or two they will appear with the A53. Right now, 4 A7s is a massive step up.

What happened to VC5?

Yeah, I was expecting either the Model C, or the Master myself.

I hope that means the Master is still to come. Probably in 2017 as rumoured before. This is more of a "pin compatible SoC upgrade" path.

I doubt it fixes the USB issues, although maybe the additional CPU resources will improve overall USB2 performance to meet the theoretical capability.

I think other boards are better for NAS usage.

Most ARM SoCs advertising high clock speeds are actually advertising max turbo speeds - just because that TV stick is saying it's running at 2GHz doesn't mean it gets there often.

Turbo is a great thing, but it's not for long workloads, it's for "race to sleep" workloads.

This is a $5 SoC, so you've got to expect some reduction in specifications given the rest of the board, and the large amount of support for the ecosystem.

People have said this new Pi is overclockable to 1100MHz too, more seems likely (very early days).

The A20 has half the A7 cores that this new Pi has.

The good thing is that this new Pi will force all the competitors to bump their specs a little where they are weaker. Maybe the next Cubieboard will use an A80.

But having a board where everything just works and is well supported is well worth it when your free time is valuable.

Broadcom have released the register level specs of the VideoCore IV, and an open (ARM space) driver is being worked on.

But tbh the VideoCore IV was designed from the ground up for embedded firmware use like this, it's a full CPU as well as a GPU, and it takes load off of the CPU. However now there are four cores it's less of an issue, and of course it makes the GPU very upgradeable.

Quad-A7 isn't too bad for $35 in my opinion. But the 12 GFLOPS GPU isn't very exciting (I was hoping that the RPi upgrade would also upgrade this aspect).

I suspect that Broadcom have given up on VideoCore development in the face of the competition, and will be licensing GPUs in the future from ARM/Img, etcc.

If you read the article's comments, The Register broke the NDA by releasing the article before the announcement.

As a result they got all the facts wrong, and made you look bad.

Btw, the Neon support in this chip makes it 20x faster at code that makes use of it (multithreaded video processing, for example), which is a nice boost.

I was hoping for native SATA or USB3 or a faster GPU, but it's $35 and the most supported ARM board on the planet...

It's the same in the UK, except chip and pin is the default and has been for around eight? ten? years already. I don't know if the magstripe is really used anymore either.

It's quaint seeing a foreigner (American) try to pay for goods with a card, and have to go through special procedures for the signature style payment.

Yeah, but the process of reducing "body frequency" is rather terminal - however ghosts can indeed walk through walls. Interacting with physical matter is a problem though - poltergeists must be able to change their frequency on demand.

Indeed it is quite a shame that they didn't take the opportunity to show off these capabilities with these very boxy buildings!

However ultimately buildings are going to have straight edges and not many curves, so a capability for curved structures may not be as useful as it first sounds. On the other hand I'm not an architect full of curved wall ideas thwarted by straight wall building practices...

But half the cost and half the time (and not using loads of wood) is certainly useful.

The article shows an internal picture of the post-install inserted rebar and concrete pour into the wall.

Also the plan would be for a printer to be installed on-site to do the printing of the components.

I think the buildings should be subjected to strength tests of course, before taking their word for it.

It's still a potential step forward in one aspect of house building.

Of course, this is recycled PR that might not be entirely truthful. The recycling of construction waste is a nice sounding feature. So it isn't the same printing material as the US based housing prints.

So there is still some manual work involved.