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I'm considering buying a raspberry for everything work related, especially software development for the web, since i'm a software engineering student and web start up founder. I would like to know if the computer would fit my needs. I dont play video games, or use computers for anything other than work,programming,study and usual web browsing.
ps: i don't know if it has any value to mention this, but i'm focusing right now on web development using Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
It's a chip from a mobile phone!
http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#performanceSpeed
- How powerful is it?
The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile encode and decode.
The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.
This means that graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to the original Xbox’s level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.
It has a selection of nice editors, interpreters and browsers, and it will suffice to try some simple stuff. However, you should not expect the speed of a full desktop, and will encounter slowness sometimes.
Browsers - don't expect the full glare of element inspection and chrome to operate. You will be able to render js, css and images normally.
You should never expect to host anything other than hardware microservices or very low traffic things from it.
Raspberry Pi is good for learning about basic computing and setting up servers. But if you are talkinng commercial web dev. It is not a web dev tool but it can help you harness and finetune your unix/linux skills which will be useful if you decide to expand to Dedicated Servers or Virtual Private Servers.
