Raspberry Pi 2 (Photo : www.pcmag.com)
Raspberry, the company well-known for building credit card sized motherboards, is releasing its newest product, the Raspberry Pi 2. Despite the new machines upgraded specs, Raspberry still holds on to its original marketing strategy by releasing it for on $35.
The new Raspberry Pi 2 features a 900MHz ARM Cortex-A7 quad-core processor, the current processor is six times faster compared to the Pi 2's predecessor. The Pi 2's memory is also upgrade to twice its predecessor's and now has a 1 gigabyte LPDDR2 SDRAM. The Pi 2 also has backwards compatibility to the Pi 1 machine.
Due to the Pi 2's ARMv7 processor the machine can run all ARM GNU/Linux operating systems like the Snappy Ubuntu Core and the yet to be released Microsoft Windows 10, according to the Raspberry Pi website.
As a result of the backward compatibility of the Pi 2, it still features the same hardware design as its predecessor. The board still runs using the 5V micro-USB adapter. The company said that they opted to use the same design to the Pi 2 in order to ease the transition of old users to the new board, according to PCMag.
Raspberry Pi founder and CEO Eben Upton said, "Since we launched the original Raspberry Pi Model B, back in 2012, we've done an enormous amount of software work to get the best out of our Broadcom BCM2835 application processor and its 700MHz ARM11 CPU. Nonetheless, there comes a point when there's no substitute for more memory and CPU performance."
Upton also added that despite the launch of the new motherboard, the Pi 1 will still be in production as long as there is demand for it.
The Raspberry Pi 2 along with the Pi 1 Model B and B+ is on sale for $35. The entry level Pi 1 Model A+ however is only for $20.
