Raspberry Pi 2 announced, available from today for $35
Raspberry’s Pi board is the favorite gadget for those who love micro computers. Available for $35, the Pi was a massive hit that propelled Raspberry into stardom. This week, Raspberry announced Pi 2, a successor to Pi that will also cost $35 and is available for sale now. Raspberry Pi 2 is powered by a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU that offers 6x performance when compared with original Pi board and supports all ARM GNU/Linux distributions. There is a 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM onboard. Best part is that the Pi 2 can run Microsoft Windows 10 operating system. Those who are interested can buy Pi2 from element14 and RS Components, sales partners for Raspberry.
Broadcom has supplied new BCM2836 chip (replacing the older BCM2835) that not only retains all the features from older chip but makes everything faster. The RAM is provided by Micron. Though there is more power onboard, the Pi 2 has identical form-factor to Pi 1. All the connectors are at the same place and you can run the board using a 5V micro-USB power adapter.
Port list
- 4 USB ports
- 40 GPIO pins
- Full HDMI port
- Ethernet port
- Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
- Camera interface (CSI)
- Display interface (DSI)
- Micro SD card slot
- VideoCore IV 3D graphics core
FAQs
Are you discontinuing the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B and B+?
No. We have a lot of industrial customers who will want to stick with Raspberry Pi 1 for the time being. We’ll keep building Raspberry Pi 1 Model B and Model B+ as long as there’s demand for it. Both these boards will continue to sell for $35.
What about Model A+?
Model A+ continues to be the $20 entry-level Raspberry Pi for the time being. Although the new board is called Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, we have no plans to introduce a Raspberry Pi 2 Model A before the end of 2015.
What about the Compute Module?
We expect to introduce a BCM2836-based Compute Module in the medium term, but for now we’re focused on getting Raspberry Pi 2 Model B out of the door.
Are you still using VideoCore?
Yes. VideoCore IV 3d is the only publicly documented 3d graphics core for ARM-based SoCs, and we want to make Raspberry Pi more open over time, not less.
Where does the “6x performance” figure come from?
The speedup varies between applications. We’ve seen single-threaded CPU benchmarks that speed up by as little as 1.5x, while Sunspider is around 4x faster, and NEON-enabled multicore video codecs can be over 20x faster. 6x is a typical figure for a multi-threaded CPU benchmark like SysBench.
Is this a full version of Windows 10?
Please refer to WindowsOnDevices.com.
