The Raspberry Pi has always been a geek’s delight, but the new Pi 2 Model B+ takes the palm-sized computers to a whole new level. With a 900MHz quad-core system-on-chip, bolstered with 1GB of RAM, the new Pi is now a real computer. And it still only costs $US35.
Previously, the Model B+ Raspberry Pi featured a Broadcom BCM2835 chip, with a single 700MHz core on board and either 256MB or 512MB of RAM. The new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B+ makes use of Broadcom’s BCM2836, which contains four 32-bit ARMv7 Cortex-A7 cores and 1GB of RAM.
What does that mean in reality? Well, the Raspberry Pi Foundation claims that performance is six times faster than the old model. Speaking to The Register, the company’s head Eben Upton explained that “it’s a usable PC now. It was always the case that you could use a Raspberry Pi 1 as a PC but you had to say ‘this is a great PC in so far as it cost me 35 bucks’. We’ve removed the caveat that you had to be a bit forgiving with it. Now it’s just good.”
And, somehow, it still costs just $US35. The new Pi 2 goes on sale today, with 100,000 units being made available in the first instance. Go and grab a real computer for a fistful of dollars.