In an exciting announcement, Raspberry Pi Foundation released a newer version of the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost credit size computer. Maintaining the same price tag but revamping every other feature, the foundation this Monday unveiled Raspberry Pi 2 with six times performance boost than the former. Announcing it with a blog post, CEO and founder Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton unveiled the brand new $35 computer.
Upton said,”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.”
This new Raspberry Pi 2 holds some of the major performance upgrades. There is an inclusion of powerful quad-core Cortex-A7 based Broadcom BCM2836 processor clocked at 900Mhz and 1GB LPDDR2 RAM, which was previously limited to 512MB. Raspberry Pi 2 includes increased number of GPIOs, and it is now capable of booting from a microSD card and holds the same Videocore IV GPU. Except the increased number of USB ports, which we previously saw in the Raspberry Pi B+, one significant change in the physical layout is that, the foundation has soldered the memory wafer just on the other side of the board beneath the processor. Earlier, both the units were placed on a single chip.
The CEO also said,”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.”
Raspberry Pi is very famous among schools and institutes located in the remote areas and those who do not have enough funds to effort several computers. Here, with the help of this little credit size computer students quickly gets hands on to learn about programming, sending emails and much more.