New Raspberry 3B+

[Brian Beuken]

Yeahhh its new Raspberry Day and the 3B gets the upgrade treatment to 3B+.

From the specs it seems that there's really nothing new that will make much impact on us, a bit more CPU power is always good, and with it a tiny bit more GPU(may be on the horizon soon), but its still the ageing, though well supported, Videocore IV GPU, sadly still a dual core. 
What a shame, a quad core version would have literally doubled its performance, but hey ho, an extra 200Mhz is not to be sniffed at.
Faster networking makes comms to VisualGDB a bit better, so faster build/compile too..its all good really.

I was kinda hoping for an Octocore 4B with a 16core OpenGLES 3.2 GPU, but until then I can play with the Odroid XU4.
Maybe next Pi Day!

I've put in my order and will give a report on any issues as soon as I can.

[Brian Beuken]

My new 3B+ arrived today, got it set up with a new flash of Raspbian, sudo apt-get the libs

sudo apt-get install libopenal-dev
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install libalut-dev
sudo apt-get install libbullet-dev
sudo apt-get install libogg-dev

And ran all test projects with the main libraries of
bcm_host pthread openal alut BulletCollision BulletSoftBody BulletDynamics LinearMath GLESv2_static EGL_static vchiq_arm vcos khrn_static
This new Rasbian of course does not have the old GLESv2 or EGL libs so don't try to use them any more.

No problems at all, Bullet runs a bit quicker of course, which is nice, graphics are indeed not yet showing any signs of increased performance, the GPU is still running at the old clock speed, the extra 200Mhz gives overall performance a nice boost up until the renderer is used.

[Brian Beuken]

hmmm so it appears, that the Pi3B/B+ is in fact a quad core GPU, I honestly didn't know that. Though as was pointed out by the Raspberry Engineers, cores, is a variable term on a mobile GPU due to a lot of shared usage and division of tasks, but for all intents an purposes its got 4 cores.

I did not know that!

So really we need to see a bit of a speed boost to get any more performance from the GPU on a 3B+, it is in the works though.