Gotta think that a faster ARM proc would cost less than supercooling but may not be as much fun... but then you could OC that bad boy too...

 
Raspberry Pi is just the shoulder of the iceberg, the rest of the ice mass is just now beginning to rise up out of the ocean.

The very tip of the ice berg, the Trim Slice and Cotton Candy are out there, but they are very expensive at $199 each and the support showered upon them by everybody is minimal at best.   Folks who charge an arm and a leg had better be able to develop and maintain their own software.

This is the next PI candidate ($70-$100) being pushed by the Chinese computer industry by supporting it with a "charitable" consortium software development company that is promoting the Allwinner chipset  by providing all the drivers and such.

http://liliputing.com/2012/03/mele-a1000-is-a-70-hackable-linux-friendly-arm-...



This one has a 1gigahertz A-8 current modern ARM phone chip in it and a full meg of on board memory.    Folks certainly haven't finished cooking the software yet and it is a Chinese commercial enterprise instead of a funky British charity, so it will never catch the buzz the Pi has gotten.

BUT -- Allwinner chipsets has a 2 gigahertz 4 core A-8 chip coming out next quarter which will likely make it into a more current version of this box.  Also note this puppy supports VGA and all other forms of graphics plus it will run all the full current mainstream Linux distros as soon as the drivers are created.  

Yet nobody is buzzing about this one at all ....


Because of the very low price and massive cultural acceptance the Raspberry Pi is going to be the landmark device, the one that will be remembered as the start of a new age in computers where everybody (including grade school kids) has one and lots of people understand what they have at a deeper level.    

I think it bodes for start point of the end of the MicroSoft era of computing, not that MS will go away soon but it's relevance will move to be more like Sun and its expensive but very capable design workstations were 15 years ago.

When people finish playing their Pi games, they will want something similar with more horsepower to play with and somebody will give it to them.






Oldfeller,

typing on an ancient 1 gighertz AMD motherboard about the size of a dinner tray using a full Linux distro that would run on the Mele box shown above.

Any panel that output five to six volts can do the job.   A six volt rechargeable battery could offer both voltage buffering and short term cloudiness bridging.

What's funny, somebody asked Eben if he was afraid somebody in China would rip off the design and slap a allwinner chip into it and then undersell him pricewise -- he said he hoped that they did and were massively successful at doing it.  The goal is to have lots of very affordable useful little units available freely to everybody.

And somebody will.   And that is good for everybody.