alt Hacker News> "...: It sounds like the key feature will be 'more': a faster CPU and faster IO, rather than new features."
Raspberry Pi Holdings is a embedded systems manufacturer for pity's sake; we don't need more from them, we need less. [EDIT] A faster Raspberry Pi 6 is encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150 and its successors and mainstream Linux distributions and that is a battle they would lose in terms of price and performance.
Give us a Raspberry Pi Zero 3W with proper sleep states to reduce sleep power consumption, lower idle power while awake, and 1 GB of RAM even if it doubles the price.
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They'll do whatever they do.
Maybe a tick-tock release cycle (one with new features and some speed, the next with the ~same features and more speed) is where they're headed, and maybe that makes sense. They wouldn't be the first.
I'd love to see even-lower-RAM versions, though. Most of what I use Raspberry Pis for at home for is not RAM-hungry at all.
My Pi4 network router has 2GB because that was the smallest/cheapest version at release when I got it, but the system itself consistently only uses about 64MB of RAM. It'd do perfectly well and have a ton of breathing room with just 128MB of RAM (which will never happen, but if it did happen...).
I suspect the Pi4 that I use as a set-top box with Kodi would be fine with 512MB.
I've used Zero Ws for all kinds of things over the years and never felt RAM-starved with their little 512MB of RAM.
So I'm learning towards 512MB.
But sure: 1GB options would also be fine even if it does double the price. Our comments serve to demonstrate that there's room in the marketplace for different SKUs with different memory capacities. :)
Ideally each RPi generation should keep the same price (or lower now that it's gotten so high) but with better performance. If they can't do that they just shouldn't create a new generation.
Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's.
Their niche is the industrial/embedded space. For that market, power consumption doesn't matter. What matters is that each model is guaranteed to be available till a specific date.
Is there some serious astroturfing going on with the N100/N150, or am I just jaded?
I have a bunch of old intel atom boards laying around. The Intel Compute Stick (TM) burnt out its flash root drive in a few months. The C2000 board I had burnt out the clock pin to drive the bios. I have a Clover Trail with a PowerVR GPU (I thought I was getting an intel GPU because it was branded Intel Graphics or similar, but nope!) that lost Windows support very quickly after launch, and has no GPU drivers for any other OS.
Instead of being fooled 4 times in a row, I looked into using an N150 for a NAS, but this time I held off a bit until after launch so I could research it first.
Lo-and-behold, they all have crazy PCIe / memory subsystem data corruption issues. I guess there are some chicken bits for the OS developers to set if the kernel can stay up long enough after boot without a panic.
Why would anyone buy this for a NAS / embedded use case?
I think exactly the opposite: we have no shortage of embedded crap we can buy; what is useful is dismembering intel. It would be better if the pi were risc v but this will do for now.
A Raspberry Pi with sleep and hibernation is like asking Valve to make Half Life 3. They just can't. It doesn't compute.
^^^ when I tell people tangential to the field that the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port), they're astonished. It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it