Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, wrote a paper in 1965 that reviewed at the past 7 years of semiconductors. He predicted that every 18 to 24 months, the amount of components you could fit in the same space would double. This exponential growth, known as Moore’s Law, has continued roughly on track since then. With this doubling comes decreases in size, increases in power, and decreases in the cost of electronics. It’s what put computers in every office, and smart phones in every pocket. In 1977, purchasing a Cray-1 supercomputer would cost you $8,860,000 ($36,239,300 in 2018 dollars). The primary use of this massive 5.5 ton beast was to compute what was known as “Floating Point Operations,” which is a specific type of calculation that require either very large or very small numbers to be calculated quickly. The Cray 1 could do roughly 160 million of these per second.
The Raspberry Pi Zero can do 200 million calculations per second, and it costs $10. This is the power of Moore’s Law.
I picked up a Raspberry Pi 3B — the Zero was sold out at the time — for $35 last year, and tinkered around with it a bit. It’s a very impressive machine. It runs an ARM processor (the same kind of processor you have in your cell phone), and supports a variety of operating systems. What’s interesting is the all-in-one solutions that people have created.
RetroPie is a full MAME emulator that will allow you to play old games, from Arcade through Atari, all the way up to PS2 and Wii. If you’ve got an old game you’d like to play, odds are you can get it to run on this little box. And what’s more, there are kits that allow you to add old game controllers or arcade-style push buttons to create your own machines.
There’s a client for Plex, a wonderful home media platform (Netflix for your videos!), created by fans to allow you to plug into any TV with an HDMI port and watch movies anywhere. This is ultimately what I’ve done with mine — to watch videos when I go home to visit family so I no longer have to prop a laptop on my dad’s mantle. It works great and is always a fun conversation piece.
Ultimately though, the Raspberry Pi is a tinker’s device that’s capable of being used in amazing ways. People have used them to control telescopes, act as a baby monitor, automate the care of terrariums and aquariums, and even to make miniature supercomputers for testing software that requires lots of processors {before they go onto actual supercomputers}. The sky is the limit – quite literally – as people have made high altitude balloon instrumentation powered by the Pi.