Hot From the Oven
A Raspberry pi with a tasty CPU

Hot from the Oven, The Raspberry Pi B 2 – with a Tasty CPU

Almost as if taking everyone by surprise, the Raspberry foundation on Monday launched a new Raspberry Pi development board, The Pi B 2 !

The new board has the following Specifications :

New Features

A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
1GB RAM

Like the (Pi 1) Model B+, it also has:

4 USB ports
40 GPIO pins
Full HDMI port
Ethernet port
Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
Camera interface (CSI)
Display interface (DSI)
Micro SD card slot
VideoCore IV 3D graphics core

I got the news while on holiday In Killarney, county Kerry and placed an order when I got back to the Hotel , these great little boards are only €42 euros after all !

I ordered from NEW IT as they have always given a great and fast service to date , with great support!

I currently own a Pi B+ with a single core CPU running at 900mhz – which I have over clocked, this new board is going to be much faster. Faster even than many of the other boards on the market and possibly faster than my All-winner(cpu) based cubietruck system.

CPU Speed at this level of computing is not one of the largest requirements (There is always going to be a faster pc!), as other areas such as number of ports and GPIO pins and their system programming availability – along with overall system stability is often more important.

I do think however that for many Raspberry pi owners and there are some three million of us around the planet, the old Broadcom single core processor (700mhz standard) with only 512mb of ram was leading to speed issues during using and developing on these systems.

Now however you should find that you can make use of the most demanding of developments IDE’s such as Netbeans and freely browse the web for downloads and technical information.

So I cannot wait to swap out the old pi B+ for the new B2, I think the old board will be used for OS’s such as Riscos, this is a great option as I wanted a board for this operating system in any case :).