$25 Raspberry Pi Trounces NVIDIA Tegra 2 and iPhone 4S Graphics

We've been keeping an eye out for the Raspberry Pi credit card-sized computer for a while now, and it looks like the small critter is not out to disappoint anyone. 

One might argue that “critter” is definitely a demeaning word now that we know what the thing can do. According to reports, the device has a more than decent computing and graphics prowess, enough to blow the iPhone 4S and even NVIDIA's Tegra 2 platform out of the water. 

The BCM2835 GPU is the reason for this latest bout of praise. 

"What's really striking is how badly Tegra 2 performs relative even to simple APs using licensed Imagination Technologies (TI and Apple) or ARM Mali (Samsung) graphics,” says executive director (and Broadcom SoC architect) Eben Upton. 

“To summarise, BCM2835 has a tile mode architecture - so it kills immediate-mode devices like Tegra on fill-rate - and we've chosen to configure it with a very large amount of shader performance, so it does very well on compute-intensive benchmarks, and should double iPhone 4S performance across a range of content.” 

At the price of $25 /19.31 Euro, there is little doubt that the Raspberry Pi can easily become the new star among home entertainment systems. 

After all, not only is the Pi so cheap, it is also incredibly small, meaning that it can be taken anywhere at any time. 

Furthermore, it bears noting that certain games, like Quake III for example, run on it just fine, not just Full HD video, meaning that certain game consoles should beware as well. 

“All the media features are to some extent a bonus, but they've been a part of our thinking ever since I joined Broadcom five years ago (having spent a year trying to build a $25 PC out of openly-available parts like Atmel microcontrollers),” Upton explains. 

“I think there's a lot to be said for a device which is useful for something other than programming. The media features provide a 'hook' to draw people to the platform; once we have them hooked, we can trick them into becoming programmers!”

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