Raspberry Pi 2: 4 cores, gigabytes of RAM, six times the performance

Perhaps the price will remain the same - $ 35

Without much preparation, the head of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Iben Upton, told The Register about the new Raspberry Pi. According to his statement, now it is a relatively full-fledged computer, looking at the characteristics of which do not need to be repeated, "it costs only $ 35."

The main changes of the new model called the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: Broadcom BCM2836 single-chip system with four ARMv7 Cortex-A7 cores at 900 MHz and Broadcom VideoCore IV 250 MHz, 1 GB of RAM, at least six times more performance than B +, and free windows 10 . Here are the results of issuing the uname -a command for the new board .


Externally, the second “pie” is not much different from B +

Prior to this, since the launch of the Raspberry Pi in February 2012, the BCM2835 chip has always been on all models, which had one single ARM1176JZF-S core with a frequency of 700 MHz. The second revision of Model B and Model B + 512 MB of RAM, all others cost only 256. In the new model, only the processor and memory have changed, the full-sized HDMI, 10/100 Ethernet, CSI and DSI ports, power over MicroUSB and the same remain the same , the form factor is slightly larger than a bank card.
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The figure of performance improvement with respect to Model B + obtained using the multi-core benchmark sysbench , that is, using only one stream of the program will not increase productivity as much. But even with the Sun Spider run, the performance increased by a factor of three compared with B +. New power can be useful in embedded systems for image processing, says Upton. There are many enthusiasts who want to create computer vision based on OpenCV. Of course, you can greatly optimize OpenCV to run on the DSP of the first Raspberry Pi, but in the end, the microcomputer simply does not have enough power.



Price Pi 2 is still unknown, but it is likely that it will remain at $ 35. Upton said that the old model B with a smaller amount of RAM and with the same price is selling well even after launching B + - some industrial buyers prefer to stay on the old hardware to avoid possible problems with migration to the new platform. It is expected that this will happen with the Raspberry Pi 2: this year the production of the new model will be 80%, the remaining 20% ​​is B +. The twenty-dollar A + will also remain on sale, perhaps its RAM will be updated from 256 MB to 512, but the low price remains in priority.

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is already available in some stores . According to the head of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, about 100,000 motherboards of the new model were produced, and Sony will continue to make about a thousand a day. About 200,000 Raspeberry Pi computers are sold for about a month, 4.5 million have been sold. Today a new version of Raspbian will also be released, which will be compatible with Pi 2. Already installed on the SD-card can be upgraded using apt-get upgrade .

Added 15:50 MSK : Information about the free embedded version of Windows 10 for developers on the Raspberry Pi will be available later , but now you can apply . This step Microsoft is designed to strengthen the influence of the company from Redmond on the Internet of things and increase the spread of Windows in such devices. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has been cooperating with Microsoft for a long time, and before the arrival of Windows on the “raspberry pie”, the insufficient computing power of the board interfered.