Continuing with what has been nothing short of revolution in affordable computing domain, Raspberry Pi Foundation has today announced sales for Raspberry Pi 3. This new model, which retails at $35, comes almost a year after the company launched Raspberry Pi 2 in February last year.
Lets have a quick rundown at the specs first :
- 1.2GHz Quad-Core Broadcom BCM2387 ARM Cortex-A53 processor, Dual Core VideoCore IV GPU
- 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1 (Bluetooth Classic and LE)
- Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
- 1GB LPDDR2 RAM, microSD Card Slot
- Operating System: Operating System Boots from Micro SD card, running a version of the Linux operating system or Windows 10 IoT
- Dimensions: 85 x 56 x 17mm
- Power: Micro USB socket 5V1, 2.5A
- Ethernet: 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
- Video Output: HDMI (rev 1.3 & 1.4, Composite RCA (PAL and NTSC)
- Audio Output: 3.5mm jack, HDMI, USB 4 x USB 2.0 Connector
- GPIO Connector: 40-pin 2.54 mm (100 mil) expansion header: 2×20 strip Providing 27 GPIO pins as well as +3.3 V, +5 V and GND supply lines
- Camera Connector: 15-pin MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI-2)
- Display Connector: Display Serial Interface (DSI) 15 way flat flex cable connector with two data lanes and a clock lane
Raspberry Pi 3 is supported by Broadcomm’s new SoC, the BCM2837. This retains the same basic architecture as its predecessors BCM2835 and BCM2836, so all those projects and tutorials which rely on the precise details of the Raspberry Pi hardware will continue to work.
The 900MHz 32-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU complex has been replaced by a custom-hardened 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53. Combining a 33% increase in clock speed with various architectural enhancements, this provides a 50-60% increase in performance in 32-bit mode versus Raspberry Pi 2, or roughly a factor of ten over the original Raspberry Pi.
All of the connectors are in the same place and have the same functionality, and the board can still be run from a 5V micro-USB power adapter. This time though, the company is recommending a 2.5A adapter if you want to connect power-hungry USB devices to the Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi 3 is available to buy today from company’s partners element14 and RS Components, and other resellers. You’ll need a recent NOOBS or Raspbian image from our downloads page. At launch, the company is using the same 32-bit Raspbian userland that we use on other Raspberry Pi devices; over the next few months we will investigate whether there is value in moving to 64-bit mode.
As for certain other interesting announcements, the company also announced that it has now shipped over eight million units of Raspberry Pi computers, with three million of them accounted by Raspberry Pi 2. This has made the company, UK’s all-time best-selling computer organisation.
