Share this story. Three years after the launch of the first Raspberry Pi, second generation hardware will go on sale today for the same $35 price while offering a lot more power. The nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold 4.5 million of the small computers. 'It's a few more than we expected,' Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton told Ars. The new 'Raspberry Pi 2' has roughly the same form factor as the $35 from July 2014, which changed the appearance by doubling the number of USB ports to four, adding more GPIO pins, and replacing the SD card slot with a MicroSD one.
Further Reading But the Model B+ had the same processor as the original released in 2012. Raspberry Pi 2 earns its '2' with upgrades to the CPU and memory. The GPU is unchanged.
The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B v1.2 board uses BCM2837, which contains a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor. It is necessary to update to at least the October 2016 version of the device firmware and Linux kernel to allow the board to boot up properly. Dec 17, 2015 - The B+ had a single core Broadcom BCM2835 Arm 6, with 512MB of RAM. The Raspberry Pi 2 (is newer) has a quad core BCM2836 Arm 7,.
The new Pi has a quad-core processor that runs at 900MHz, compared to a single-core CPU that ran at 700MHz in the first generation. It's also an ARMv7 processor rather than an ARMv6 processor, which available on the original hardware. Raspbian, a version of Debian compiled for the original Pi’s processor, will make another appearance on Raspberry Pi 2, but the ARMv7 processor should also allow volunteers to bring Ubuntu and other OSes to the hardware. The new Pi will have 1GB of RAM, double the previous version. You'll be able to find links to distributors selling the new Pi at the. Raspberry Pi 2 is a “Model B,” though there is no Model A yet for the second generation hardware.
Model A from the first generation will still be available. “The current Raspberry Pi Model A+ is $20.
We don't know yet when that will be updated. We suspect it will get a RAM upgrade (256-512MB) before a processor upgrade. Keeping the price low is the priority,” Raspberry Pi evangelist Matt Richardson told Ars. Raspberry Pi Foundation New Raspbian operating system images will also be released today. “They'll be compatible with either the Raspberry Pi or the Raspberry Pi 2,” Richardson said. “People with SD cards that already have Raspbian on them will be able to update (only from their original Raspberry Pi) so that their Raspberry Pi 2 can boot them. They'll need to use apt-get upgrade.” The one catch is that people moving from the earliest Pi versions will have to get the image onto a MicroSD card instead of a standard-sized SD card.
![Raspberry Raspberry](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125354394/646993591.jpg)
Getting a Pi when they first came out was difficult due to demand that far outstripped supply. The supply chain has gotten better, with the ability to build many tens of thousands a week, mostly at a Sony factory in Wales, Upton told Ars. Upton expects more than 100,000 to be ready for today's on sale date. They'll probably have to keep pumping them out, though; the foundation is still selling about 200,000 of the older Raspberry Pi computers a month. The greater CPU power and memory in Raspberry Pi 2 will surely fuel more creative projects.
The original Pi hardware was used to build robots, arcade machines, media centers, a high-performance computing cluster, musical instruments,. The Pi is also used to teach children how to program. Upton thinks the newest Pi will be fast enough to use as a basic desktop computer. The second generation should offer smoother Web browsing and the ability to run multiple programs at once without a noticeable slowdown, he said. 'We're hoping people could use it as their main PC,' he said. 'We have people here at the office who use them as their second PC.'
UPDATE: It turns out both and will run on the new Raspberry Pi. 'For the last six months we’ve been working closely with Microsoft to bring the forthcoming Windows 10 to Raspberry Pi 2. Microsoft will have much more to share over the coming months,' Upton wrote today. 'The Raspberry Pi 2-compatible version of Windows 10 will be available free of charge to makers.' The version of Ubuntu available for the Pi is Snappy Ubuntu Core.
This version targeted at developers and cloud deployments does not have a desktop interface. Promoted Comments. Ars Praetorian. WINDOWS 10 For the last six months we’ve been working closely with Microsoft to bring the forthcoming Windows 10 to Raspberry Pi 2.
Microsoft will have much more to share over the coming months. The Raspberry Pi 2-compatible version of Windows 10 will be available free of charge to makers. I doubt the regular x86 applications will run on this. Yet, it's exciting that Microsoft wants to be a part of this. I think Microsoft wants makers to develop software for the ARM version of Windows 10 and make it that much more viable of a platform where Windows RT failed. It's a win-win - Microsoft gets more developers on the platform, users of the Raspberry Pi get a more familiar OS, and everyone's happy. 418 posts registered Nov 1, 2010.
Ars Praetorian. Peechy, but why oh why no gigabit ethernet? Lack of this feature cripples the board as a potential NAS server, which would otherwise be perfectly suited to. The original Pi was designed for educational purposes, and the costs had to be capped. The same question was posed of the original model, and the answer was that the Ethernet port was on the USB bus, which limited its bandwidth.
I haven't seen the specs for the new Pi, but given that it appears to be very close to the original in design (for compatibility purposes), I suspect the same restriction applies. 21 posts registered Feb 18, 2008. Ars Scholae Palatinae.