Earlier this month the Pi Foundation launched the new Raspberry Pi 2 mini PC that is equipped with a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU supported by 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM and offers 6x the performance of the pervious model while still providing complete compatibility with older Raspberry Pi hardware.
During the launch an interesting discovery was made when bloggers and journalists around the world started taking photos of the new Raspberry Pi 2, using cameras equipped with Xenon Flash, which when triggered froze the system and forced a reboot.
Dave over at the EEVBlog has released an explanation this week revealing how the Xenon Flash effects the Raspberry Pi 2 mini PC and can be seen in the video below.
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.”
Source: EEVBlog
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