Makers, hobbyists and developers will be please to know that today the Raspberry Pi foundation has announced the launch of the new Raspberry Pi 2 single board mini PC. Which is now available to purchase at the same price as the existing Raspberry Pi Model B+ for $35.
The new Raspberry Pi 2 now offers six times the processing power than the previous Pi mini PCs and is equipped with a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU supported by 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM while still providing complete compatibility with the original Raspberry Pi version 1 hardware.
Due to the inclusion of a ARMv7 processor, the latest Pi mini PC computer is capable of running the full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions, including Snappy Ubuntu Core, as well as the new Microsoft Windows 10 operating system if desired. The Pi Foundation explains :
“Since we launched the original Raspberry Pi Model B, back in 2012, we’ve done an enormous amount of software work to get the best out of our Broadcom BCM2835 application processor and its 700MHz ARM11 CPU. We’ve spent a lot of money on optimising a wide variety of open-source libraries and applications, including WebKit, LibreOffice, Scratch, Pixman, XBMC/Kodi, libav and PyPy.
At the same time, the Raspbian project, run by Peter Green and Mike Thompson, has provided us with an ARMv6-compatible rebuild of Debian with hardware floating point support, and Gordon, Dom and Jonathan have spent thousands of hours working on the firmware and board support to make Raspberry Pi the most stable single board computer in the world. It’s worth going back and trying out an old SD card image from 2012 to get an idea of how far we’ve come.
Nonetheless, there comes a point when there’s no substitute for more memory and CPU performance. Our challenge was to figure out how to get this without throwing away our investment in the platform or spoiling all those projects and tutorials which rely on the precise details of the Raspberry Pi hardware.
Fortunately for us, Broadcom were willing to step up with a new SoC, BCM2836. This retains all the features of BCM2835, but replaces the single 700MHz ARM11 with a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 complex: everything else remains the same, so there is no painful transition or reduction in stability.”
For more information on the new Raspberry Pi 2 mini PC jump over to the Pi Foundation website for details via the link below.
Source: RPi Foundation
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