The Raspberry Pi 2 is to launch today, boosting the performance of the credit-card sized computer by up to six times, according to its makers. The low-budget Raspberry Pi has been the biggest British computing success since the heyday of the micro computers of the mid-1980s.
Now firmly established in schools and homes across the country, the Raspberry Pi spec has been revised a couple of times since the launch of the original Model B back in February 2012. However, this latest release looks set to deliver the biggest performance boost yet.
The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B will use a Broadcom BCM2836 system-on-a-chip, which has a 900MHz quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM. That, according to Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton, is six times faster than the Model B+ that was released last year when running the SysBench benchmark. The B+ had a single-core 700MHz processor with only 512MB of RAM.
"I think it's a usable PC now," said Upton, speaking to The Register. "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."
Aside from the performance boost, the design of the Raspberry Pi 2 remain the same as its predecessor. Better still, the price is set to remain the same, too, at around £25.
The Raspberry Pi 2 will go on sale today, with Upton predicting that there might be a rush for the improved model. A hundred thousand units will be available immediately, with Upton predicting a "little queue" to get your hands on one, although nothing like the six-month waits that followed the launch of the original.