
New Raspberry Pi Model B+ - nnnnnick
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-3-model-bplus-sale-now-35/
======
Narishma
Why was the title changed? It's misleading right now since there's already a
Raspberry Pi Model B+ available for ages. Should be "New Raspberry Pi 3 Model
B+" just like on the blog post.

~~~
nikofeyn
in general, i find the aggressive title changing on hacker news confusing.
it’s been happening a lot recently where i can’t find a post by eye where i
know i _knew_ the title or where the title was changed _away_ from the exact
title of the linked post or article.

~~~
tjoff
Indeed it is quite frustrating and I often wonder why someone would waste
energy in updating titles for no apparent reason.

------
jimmies
PXE booting is sweet. I develop an OS (Crankshaft) for the Pi, and a lot of
times it just has been waiting to write a new OS to the SD card, waiting,
plugging it in, realizing I forgot to do something, so I had to repeat. Each
time it was 15 minutes of waiting. Pulling the card out and putting it back
in, especially with the ribbon cable on the way (and a case too) has been
really painful. PXE boot is going to solve that. So I'm very, very excited for
this.

In the blog, they mentioned the possibility of having a Pi3A too, so I look
forward to that as well. The project I have has not much need for lots of USB
ports and ethernet, so having to pay for and power a hub and an ethernet port
only add to the power requirements with no added benefit. The Pi3A will be the
prime target for me if they release it.

The only thing I wish they had is microphone input (we need the mic input for
"OK Google") but I don't think it will happen, so that's one more thing on the
wish list.

~~~
sjuut
Or you can use the u-boot bootloader[1], and boot a kernel and root filesystem
from TFTP, right?
[1][http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot](http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot)

~~~
jimmies
For any problem, there is always someone who could come up with a brilliant
solution and makes me feel like a dummy. That is a great idea I haven't
thought of!

PS: Upon further inspection, PXE netbooting is already possible on the 3B
under the name of "USB booting," it's just not the default in the hardware,
and there might be bugs that are fixed in the new version.

~~~
kingosticks
But remember you can always put the very latest bugfixed version of
bootcode.bin standalone on an SD card and use that instead of the version in
your Pi's bootrom. This also works for older models (Pi/Pi2) that don't have
PXE support in their bootrom.

~~~
floatboth
Even with the new bootcode.bin, Pi 3 firmware netbooting has been extremely
unreliable for me.

And at this point, if you already use an SD card for the bootcode, might as
well put the whole U-Boot onto the card (which I did)

------
filleokus
I'm always so impressed with the supply chain of the Raspberry PI foundation.
I woke up today, saw the HN story, and during lunch went to a local store and
picked one up. I live in a small-ish town in Sweden. I know it's not like a
iPhone release or whatever, but still impressive that they manage to get it
out to my local store on release day.

------
qalmakka
"Just over two years ago, we released Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. This was our
first 64-bit product"

Very unfortunate that their in-house developed and promoted OS ("Raspbian")
only supports armv7, thus leaving the vast majority that doesn't know about
the existence of (or how to use) archlinux ARM an the likes with a 32 bit os.
Am I the only one that doesn't get the sense out of this here? Debian supports
Aarch64 out of the box I think.

~~~
jimmies
To me, that makes a lot of sense. Having only one architecture to support and
one image to rule them all across the product line is quite a great thing to
have.

The other day, there was a person who had a "reddit gold" bounty for the first
person who can help them get the Pi 0 online. The person basically couldn't
get the Pi Zero on the wireless network. They had no USB-OTG adapter or mini
HDMI adapter they could use to debug the Pi Zero. I was thinking something
along the line of making the Pi USB port a USB-serial gadget, but it was still
cumbersome. The "accepted solution" was to pull out the SD card for the Zero,
put it into a Pi3B they had, get the 3B online, and put it back to the Zero. I
think that was such a brilliant idea.

Making it easy for users to achieve such tasks is often overlooked by us who
"know too much" to not care about the efficiency of the new hardware. I don't
think it was an accident that the Pi is so ubiquitous in education: They made
a lot of right decisions to make their product easy to use.

~~~
cr0sh
I'd love to give reddit gold (if I had any) to anyone who could point me to a
source for the Pi Zero at the price point it was originally supposed to be
selling at: $5.00

I have yet to find it - you can get them cheap, but no where near what the RPi
Foundation advertised them at when they first were announced/launched.

~~~
dtparr
It depends where you are. Microcenters generally have them for $5 ($10 for the
'W'), although for Pi Day they're both on sale for $3.14. Sadly, there aren't
any near me, but I had a relative who is near them pick up a literal handful
last time they came down.

Several online places have them for $5, but shipping 'kills the deal' as they
say.

~~~
antongribok
MicroCenter is where I buy them. I happen to have one close by.

They also sell the normal RPi3 for $29.99 instead of $35.

------
Yaggo
I wish they would finally expose the data lines for the second camera in their
"hobbyist" boards as well. Currently the dual camera setup is supported only
by Compute Module, but it's cumbersome to use because the bulky I/O board (and
expensive).

The foundation is overlooking the most unique feature of the Broadcom chipset,
the 3D video support. They already have implemented the software/driver side,
so only thing required is just exposing the pins from the SOC and adding
second camera connector – very low hanging fruit. (The Zero board may not have
enough space for routing but the bigger boards definitely have.)

~~~
titchard
That is interesting, I didn't even know that was a feature that was capped on
the RPi.

I can see that being made into very compact 3D Scanners very quickly after
launch if that was added as a feature.

~~~
Yaggo
To clarify, the "3D video feature" is nothing more than being able to record
simultaneously from two cameras and merge the video inputs into side-by-side
H264 stream. Combined with hardware H264 encoding with delay of ~100 ms, this
is very useful for certain applications (in my case, live 3D video
broadcasting from UAV). I'm not aware of any other "tinkerer-friendly" board
capable of that.

~~~
imtringued
The hardware accelleration for H264 sounds interesting. Although 100ms is not
as ideal as I want but it's reasonable. Is it actually possible to use this
feature in practice? Are proprietary drivers an issue?

Also is it possible to browse the web and e.g. watch videos on youtube with
adequate performance on an RPi? (different topic)

~~~
Yaggo
> Is it actually possible to use this feature in practice? Are proprietary
> drivers an issue?

I've streamed 3D video over wifibroadcast¹ to OSVR headset, no fundamental
issues. The exact lag depends on resolution, fps, etc settings. It would be
superb to cut the delay to sub-50 ms range, but that's probably not going to
happen as it would require major rewrite of the H264 stack, as currently there
are always two full frames in the pipeline, e.g. in 30 fps it makes 1000/30*2
-> ~70 ms delay². (Note that I'm not the author of the befinitiv website.)

The foundation has released open-source driver stack³ (raspivid etc), but
AFAIK they have rather limited resources for software development (single ex-
broadcom developer?) and limited access to proprietary features
(documentation?) of the Broadcom chipset. Many things work but I think the
capabilities of the SOC aren't yet fully utilized.

> Also is it possible to browse the web and e.g. watch videos on youtube with
> adequate performance on an RPi? (different topic)

No personal experience, but RPi 3 should be okayish for lightweight desktop
use (YMMV) with 1 GB of RAM being main limitation for multitasking.

[1] [https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/wifibroadcast-analog-like-
tr...](https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/wifibroadcast-analog-like-transmission-
of-live-video-data/) [2] [https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/latency-
analysis-...](https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/latency-analysis-of-
the-raspberry-camera/) [3]
[https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland](https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland)

------
NKosmatos
A new Pi released on Pi-day, how fitting. Instead if "Pi 3 Model B+" they
should have named it just "Pi 3.14" :-)

~~~
yipbub
You can simplify that to Pi^2

~~~
zdkl
Call up Pypy, there's a marketing opportunity for next year.

~~~
dordoka
Already taken! [https://pypy.org/](https://pypy.org/)

------
DoubleMalt
2GB of RAM would've been more important to me than all the listed changes.

~~~
gambiting
For this(and other) reason, the Asus Tinker Board looks like the superior
choice, for very little more money than the Pi3:

[https://www.asus.com/uk/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-
Board/](https://www.asus.com/uk/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-Board/)

~~~
kingosticks
The last time I checked out the Asus Tinker it was still suffering from
horrendous software support and cost nearly twice as much in the UK (which it
still does, £32 vs £55). So unless you NEED those extra features, I strongly
disagree.

~~~
onesun
I bought one and played with it over the holidays and there are a ton of OS
options now. There's Armbian support now, which wasn't around at first, and it
seems to be very stable and feature complete. The board is significantly more
powerful than a Pi 3 with emulators and compiling and just about everything.

~~~
kingosticks
I had so many problems with Tinker OS and I wasn't the only one. Never tried
Armbian so maybe it's better, how's the graphics performance with that?

------
ChuckMcM
I am always impressed at how people can buy a fully functional computer for
$35. That said, as an engineer I often cringe at the compromises made. Like
"Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0". Since the top bit rate of USB2.0 is 480Mbps
and GbE is 1250Mbps, USB 2 only has about 1/3 the bit rate to support it.

Now it will be faster than 10/100 ethernet connections but don't expect to
send a 100 megabytes/second through it.

~~~
Hello71
wait, since when can gigabit ethernet transmit more than a gigabit per second?

~~~
jwbensley
Are you referring to this?

"GbE is 1250Mbps"

1.25Gbps is the "gross" bit rate for 1000BASE-T Ethernet. This is because it
uses 8b/10b encoding on the wire (meaning there is a 25% overhead):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding)

1000Mbps is essentially the "net" bit rate available to the Ethernet protocol.

~~~
ChuckMcM
exactly right. Different standards claim different things, but ethernet tries
to do the "right" thing and have the number in the name be the actual number
of bits per second you get through the thing. Unlike say serial ports where
9600 bits per second isn't 1200 8 bit bytes per second, its only 960 8 bit
bytes per second because of a start bit and stop bit. This can be even worse
on serial protocols with forward error correction where up to a third of the
bits going across the wire are for error correction and/or clock recovery.

------
muxator
> Here’s a long post. [...] If you don’t have time to read it all, we
> recommend you watch this video

The video is 1 minute long. The article is ~84 lines, ~8 KB of text. Is that
really long?

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
If you're not a native English speaker, I imagine the video may be preferable
to the article.

~~~
qalmakka
As a non-native English speaker, I doubt that. In general listening to English
is quite complex for someone that has learnt English only from school;
listening to a non native language (especially a quirky spelled one like
English) requires quite a bit of excercise to fully understand the various
accents and how the words pronounced often illogically associate with those
words you've learnt from books. I personally found vastly simpler in the
beginning to read text instead of listening to a native speaker talking.
That's also why captions in movies help a lot someone learning the language.

~~~
robotmay
I really wish it was easier to find movies in other languages to help
learning. I've been half-heartedly trying to learn French the past few years
but it's deceptively hard to either find a decent streaming service, or to
find torrents with French audio + subtitles.

Strangely it was quite easy when I had a stab at Swedish a few years ago; a
number of their TV channels have a free streaming service that you can access
from anywhere.

~~~
qalmakka
Maybe you may have more luck using legal services such as Netflix. I'm quite
sure they have subtitles for most of the languages they support; at least, I'm
sure they have them for English, German and Italian. Torrents are often a poor
choice with regards to captions, because either you manage to find a source
that ripped them from an source in sync with video (such as the DVD), or you
have to resort to fan dubs or that kinds of sort.

~~~
Nullabillity
For some idiotic reason Netflix geofences their subtitles. Here in Sweden
you're lucky if there are even the original English subtitles available for
the thing you're trying to watch.

I've even managed to find a few shows where they didn't even bother to allow
disabling the subtitles!

~~~
Semaphor
> For some idiotic reason Netflix geofences their subtitles.

Same clusterfuck as with other copyright things. Different companies have the
rights to the subtitles and it depends on what terms Netflix got. One of the
reasons [0] I mentioned why piracy is still superior even for someone paying
and wanting to pay.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360517)

------
boris
>We use a magjack that supports Power over Ethernet (PoE), and bring the
relevant signals to a new 4-pin header. We will shortly launch a PoE HAT which
can generate the 5V necessary to power the Raspberry Pi from the 48V PoE
supply.

This is nice though I personally wish they used the same Silvertel PoE module
as Arduino which you just solder onto the board. Plus their PoE hat has a
spinning fan.

~~~
michaelt

      Plus their PoE hat has a spinning fan.
    

Looks like it's directly above the CPU - might just be to compensate for the
worse airflow from the obstruction of the extra board?

~~~
undersuit
From pictures it looks like the fan would definitely be needed. The hat is
very low clearance to maintain compatibility with the official cases.

[https://blog.hackster.io/the-new-raspberry-pi-poe-
hat-823de8...](https://blog.hackster.io/the-new-raspberry-pi-poe-
hat-823de8a8f5f)

------
mattbierner
I’ve been using Pis to stream video from webcams for various experiments and
the built-in wireless on the 3 and Zero W was game changing. All the usb WiFi
adapters I had tried previously were unreliable or had too much latency. Very
excited to try out the improved wireless on this board

~~~
mrsteveman1
> the built-in wireless on the 3 and Zero W was game changing

Definitely, the Pi Zero W is now my go-to controller for almost anything that
needs one. The fact that Microcenter frequently sells them for $5 seals it.

I pair them with a $15 aMLC (MLC in SLC mode) industrial MicroSD card[1], and
they've been rock solid, no FS corruption on power loss, no Wi-Fi drop outs.

The ability to add the Pi Camera board and have a tiny full HD networked
camera with trustworthy "firmware" is a killer feature though, pre-made IP
cameras at any price tend to have outdated insecure or even malicious firmware
that may or may not be replaceable.

[1] [https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/atp-electronics-
in...](https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/atp-electronics-
inc/AF4GUD3A-OEM/AF4GUD3A-OEM-ND/5361062)

------
danellis
> If you’ve been a Raspberry Pi watcher for a while now, you’ll have a bit of
> a feel for how we update our products.

Model B... Model A... Model B+...

When can we expect to see the Raspberry Pi Master and the Raspberry Pi Master
Compact?

~~~
majewsky
Raspberry Pi Pro

Raspberry Pi Air

Retina Raspberry Pi

~~~
aeleos
Im prepping for Raspberry Pi X

------
matthberg
Power over Ethernet is terrific, this means only one cord is now needed for a
fully functioning pi (assuming you have the proper Ethernet setup on the other
end).

~~~
cuonic
But PoE isn't actually built-in to the Pi, it requires an external hat,
purchased separately, and using a PoE hat has been possible on previous
versions, yet they decided to announce it now, it's confusing.

~~~
fredoliveira
They are not announcing PoE now. It is listed next to this particular model's
features. The new/updated functionality is even bold (and power over ethernet
is not).

~~~
cuonic
I'm aware of the fact, it was just strange how they announced it in the video
[0], as if it was a new feature. PoE has been possible on previous versions
with a PoE hat aswell, so nothing really new.

0: [https://youtu.be/i62xdD4QKtA?t=44](https://youtu.be/i62xdD4QKtA?t=44)

~~~
ThatPlayer
Weren't previous PoE hats just ethernet splitters that also had a 5V output to
the Pi rails, but still required another Ethernet cable to connect to the Pi's
actual Ethernet port?

~~~
gruturo
Funny thing is you don't even need a HAT, there are passthrough extractors and
they're cheap (30 bucks for a pack of 4): [https://www.amazon.com/ANVISION-
Splitter-Adapter-Compliant-R...](https://www.amazon.com/ANVISION-Splitter-
Adapter-Compliant-Raspberry/dp/B079D99Y3Y)

Let's see how much the official PoE HAT is, but it better be cheap or I know
what I'll be buying (more of)

~~~
gambiting
This is definitely not PoE, just a hack on top of normal ethernet
infrastructure. If you use one of these with a normal PoE switch you will fry
whatever is connected on the other side, as it won't step down the voltage
from 48V to 5V. Both sides need to be using this, but then real PoE is
guaranteed to work even on 100m long cables, with this your 5V will end up
being <4V with a 100m long cable and potentially useless.

~~~
gruturo
Nope, this is not the ghetto "Passive PoE" variety which uses the 4 wires not
needed for 100Mbps to carry power. This is an actual 802.3af/at compliant
adapter.

I have 2 in my home (not the exact model I listed because I'm on the other
side of the Atlantic, bought them off Amazon Germany), hooked to a Netgear
GS110TP (8 PoE copper ports, 2 SFP ).

Actually there's so much stuff drawing power (2 Pi, 2 Ubiquity APs) that I'm
starting to worry about the load on the switch.

------
antirez
A bit worried by the increased power usage for certain applications. For
instance I used to power my PI with a cell phone battery pack without any
trouble.

~~~
mcjiggerlog
Those models still exist, along with the even lower powered pi zero.

~~~
arbitrage
You can also adjust the CPU power and timing frequencies to underclock your pi
for better battery life.

------
dwheeler
This is a nice minor upgrade, good job. That said, I'd love to see a new model
with more memory. That would require Broadcom (or some other organization) to
develop a revised SoC that supported more control pins, but in a large sense
that's a small change, and memory is cheap enough that adding some more memory
wouldn't significantly change the price. But it would greatly extend what
software the Pi can usefully run. Most software developers don't care very
much about memory size, leading to bloat in size. As a result, the little
memory limits what applications the current Raspberry Pi can use, including
many programs useful for education. I wish them luck!

~~~
digi_owl
Or perhaps some kind of storage connectivity beyond USB.

------
stdcall83
Gigabit ethernet over usb 2? Will never reach gigabit speeds...

~~~
xienze
Disappointed that there still isn't a dedicated Ethernet controller. I would
rather have that at 100Mbps than "gigabit" over USB.

~~~
xienze
Why the downvotes? It's a legitimate criticism. USB Ethernet is slower and
consumes more CPU cycles.

~~~
Narishma
But it is cheap and good enough for the foundation's goals.

------
api
Still Ethernet via USB 2.0, which means it is not actually gigabit.

~~~
poizan42
I also noticed that. It's only ~280 megabits so seems a bit dishonest to call
it gigabit. I guess what they mean is "gigabit ethernet standard" i.e.
1000BASE-T.

Also how does it act once its internal receive buffer is full? Is it possible
to get the sender to slow down, or does it have to start dropping frames? Will
important things such as ARP broadcasts and DHCP requests just risk getting
lost?

~~~
pmyteh
There is nothing dishonest about their announcement: they are explicit that
speed is limited by the USB bus:

> While the USB 2.0 connection to the application processor limits the
> available bandwidth, we still see roughly a threefold increase in throughput
> compared to Raspberry Pi 3B.

Followed by a table showing 315Mb/s bandwidth, three times that of the 3B but
a third that of full-speed Gigabit. And this isn't tucked away in a footnote,
it's up front in the middle of the article.

~~~
poizan42
The article yes, not the technical specification chart that is probably what
most people see before buying it.

~~~
pmyteh
The product page, which is probably what most people see before buying it,
simply says 'faster Ethernet':

> 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, dual-band wireless LAN, Bluetooth
> 4.2/BLE, faster Ethernet, and Power-over-Ethernet support (with separate PoE
> HAT)

I'm a bit cross because of the casual assumption of bad faith, when it seems
to me they've gone to some effort to do the opposite: make the limitations
clear instead of relying on a buzzword.

------
sp0ck
What I'm missing is on board flash. Even 512MB would be such useful for many
usage scenarios to put OS there. SD cards are biggest source of problems on
long run RPi's without some tweaking. There are almost none SBC with built in
flash (BeagleBone is shiny exception).

~~~
tssva
It doesn't exactly fill the same niches as the regular RPi but the RPi Compute
Module 3 does have 4G of emmc builtin. You can get a compute module and
breakout board for $136 on Amazon.

------
m-p-3
They should have called it the Raspberry Pi 3.14, considering which day it is
;)

------
locusm
+1 for PoE support

~~~
cuonic
PoE support has always been available with a seperate PoE Hat [0], I found it
to be a strange announcement.

0: [https://coolcomponents.co.uk/products/pi-poe-switch-hat-
powe...](https://coolcomponents.co.uk/products/pi-poe-switch-hat-power-over-
ethernet-for-raspberry-pi)

~~~
loxias
I was confused by that too. "You used to require a separate board to use PoE.
Now you... still need a separate board to use PoE." Oh well.

Also, as possibly the only person left who really doesn't care at all about
wireless... I'm glad there's a refresh, sure, but... I'm meh. I've been pxe
booting my pi3s for a while now.

Now, if it had official "clean" debian support (not "raspian") that would be
something!

~~~
robotmay
Possibly it will make the official PoE board cheaper? The existing one I have,
which works rather well actually, cost almost the same as the Pi, which kinda
limits its usefulness (when a PSU costs ~£6 max)

------
wbsun
Feel like RPi is heading to a commercial upgrade direction: more cores, higher
frequency, faster processors, faster networks, etc. Wasn't RPi originally
designed to teach programming and to make a hackable gadget? With that goal, I
think a simple (and therefore maybe low performance) system is easier to learn
and to hack than more and more fancy and complex architecture. From that
perspective, BBC Micro bit is doing the right thing IMO.

~~~
flyinghamster
Why not upgrade it, though? Keeping it a system for teaching/hacking while
improving performance is a win-win, as far as I'm concerned. For commercial
applications, I'd think the Compute Module would be a better bet.

------
r_singh
I'm a big fan of the Raspberry Pi community in general and have used it for
multiple applications over the years; most recently as a media center TV box.
However, the hardware now feels old and I wish for more of an update from the
Pi foundation.

If anyone hear is looking for a true upgrade on the Pi, try the ODROID C2,
it's years ahead of the Pi in terms of performance.

~~~
tonylemesmer
Lots of people say there are superior devices - however the community size and
support for Raspberry Pi cannot be overstated.

The price of an Odroid XU4 is significantly proportionally higher and I have
no guarantee that certain features or projects are feasible on it. First
result from Dec 2017 when searching for "XU4 Kodi" is someone having a problem
installing and then saying "I would prefer a version with long term support
and wide use base." Well my answer to that is RPi.

I'm merely implying that RPi has a higher chance of certain things working
simply because its more popular. I'm not disputing that there are higher
performance platforms for "similar" money but it's reliability and a little
more certainty that some people are after.

I would love to try one of the ODROID devices, I simply don't have the time.
And I love seeing suggestions for these other devices so please don't stop
posting them :)

~~~
r_singh
I agree with you, the ODROID XU4 is significantly more expensive and doesn't
have nearly as much support as one can expect from the Pi community.

However, the ODROID C2 is priced similarly to the Pi and has more support than
the XU4. LibreELEC has out of the box support for the C2.

------
digi_owl
Reminds me that i have a 3B sitting around that i have yet to do anything
with.

------
SlowBro
I'm still waiting for an inexpensive Linux board with proper sleep support.
Suspend, hibernate, etc., and come back within milliseconds instead of dozens
of seconds, and under $30 USD.

------
Slansitartop
> 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM

When are they going to upgrade the memory? All of that is nice, but what I've
really wanted is one with at least 3-4GB.

~~~
floatboth
When Broadcom has a less shitty SoC for them…

------
znpy
No full gigabit ethernet :(

------
bdz
I'd really want to see a benchmark between this and Odroid C2

------
ISNIT
I'm looking forward for the Pi 3 Model B+Xv2.0

------
cashy
Happy kodi server update day

~~~
Tepix
Amlogic S905X boxes are the better choice for Kodi these days. You can
installi LibreElec, they are cheaper than a Raspberry Pi 3 and they support 4K
& HDR and have hardware acceleration for H.265 (HEVC) and VP9.

~~~
petecooper
I've never been entirely comfortable with these HTPC boxes with factory-issued
OS, especially connecting to a local network.

Do you have any advice or feedback on Amlogic S905X-based boxes that can have
the OS flashed to something more generic (Debian-based, ideally)? Thanks!

~~~
Tepix
Yes. The box comes with Android 6 on it and you replace it with LibreElec. I
think they all work with LibreElec these days - no guarantees!

------
schappim
TL;DR: The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is a nice update that provides, better
networking with WiFi now 802.11.b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2/BLE and Gigabit
Ethernet (although limited to 300Mbps). For Makers, the Raspberry Pi
Foundation has made it easier to incorporate the RPi3B+ into end products
keeping the RPi3B+ in production until at least January 2023 and providing
"modular compliance certification" for the wireless module.

Source: [https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/blog/new-raspberry-
pi-3...](https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/blog/new-raspberry-
pi-3-model-b/)

WHAT IS THE SAME: \-----------------

\- Same mechanical footprint as both the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and the
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. \- Same GPIO pinout, so no need to change your
hats/shields/daughter boards \- Same power supply recommended (5V/2.5A DC via
micro USB connector) \- Broadcom BCM2837B0, Cortex-A53 64-bit SoC (System on a
Chip), but this time clocked to 1.4GHz, which yields roughly a 10% performance
increase over the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. The chip now has a metallic heatsink
and bears the markings BCM2837B0 1FSBG, TA1738 P20 W39-01 N2 W.

WHAT IS NEW: \------------

WIRELESS MODULE:

The product briefing document from the foundation states that the onboard
wireless module now supports dual-band 2.4GHz/5GHz IEEE 802.11ac and both
Bluetooth 4.2 and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). ​

The wireless module in the RPi3B+ is not mentioned in the product briefing
document and is hidden under shielding. Prying open the shielding revealed a
Cyprus Wireless CYW43455 (datasheet).

\- The CYW43455 supports the following WiFI standards: 802.11ac/n/a/b/g/d/h/i
\- Security: (WEP/ WPA Personal / WPA2 Personal / WMM /WMM-PS (U-APSD) /WMM-SA
/ AES (hardware accelerator) /TKIP (hardware accelerator) / CKIP (software
support) \- Proprietary protocols (CCXv2, CCXv3, CCXv4, CCXv5, WFAEC \- IEEE
802.15.2 Coexistence Compliance (on-silicon solution compliant with IEEE
3-wire requirements) \- The CYW43455 supports the following future IEEE
drafts/standards: 802.11r (fast roaming between APs), 802.11w (secure
management frames), 802.11 Extensions:, 802.11e QoS Enhancements (as per the
WMM specification is already supported), 802.11h 5 GHz Extensions, 802.11i MAC
Enhancements, 802.11k Radio Resource Measurement

The CYW43455 data sheet states that the Bluetooth core supports:

\- Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR \- Bluetooth 3.0 \- Bluetooth 4.2 (Bluetooth Low
Energy)

The Wireless LAN module now has "modular compliance certification", which
allows the board to be designed into end products with significantly reduced
wireless LAN compliance testing, improving both cost and time to market.

NEW GIGABIT ETHERNET _:

The new RPi3B+ has support for Gigabit Ethernet using Microchip's LAN7515
(_which is a USB 2.0 to 10/100/1000 Ethernet Bridge with 4-port USB 2.0 Hub).
The LAN7515 supports a max number of 6 downstream USB ports and 1 Ethernet
Port limited to a maximum throughput of 300 Mbps. The LAN7515's ethernet
controller supports numerous power management wakeup features, including Magic
Packet™, Wake-on LAN (WOL) and Link Status Change.

POWER:

The RPi3B+ is Power over Ethernet (PoE)–enabled, but requires the purchasing
of a separate PoE HAT.

PRODUCTION LIFETIME:

If you're thinking of incorporating the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ into another
product, the Raspberry Pi foundation has committed to keeping the RPi3B+ in
production until at least January 2023.

HEAT MANAGEMENT:

Due to the BCM2837 now running at 1.4GHz, the RPi3B+, runs relatively warm.
The foundation provides the following warning: "This product should be
operated in a well-ventilated environment and, if used inside a case, the case
should not be covered". Given the optional "open lid configuration" of the
official Raspberry Pi case I asked for clarification, and their Director of
Product Management came back with: "It only means if you have it in a case the
case itself should not then be covered".

~~~
drinchev
> This product should be operated in a well-ventilated environment and, if
> used inside a case, the case should not be covered

Does this make the B+ model more dangerous in case of overheating?

I have a couple of Pis running inside official Pi case they hold between 35 -
53 degrees. ( 35 meaning unheated room ). I would be sad if I upgrade the
devices and then loose my sleep in case of overheating.

~~~
akerro
>Does this make the B+ model more dangerous in case of overheating?

3A has similar issue, when it overheats it automatically drops CPU clock to
afair 60% of normal until temperature drops down.

~~~
Aissen
And it's actually covered in the article:
[https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2018/03/sysbench-2.p...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2018/03/sysbench-2.png)

