The Raspberry Pi Foundation has reported that more than 8 million Pi computers have shipped since the original Model B went on sale exactly four years ago today. As a Bon Anniversaire, the Pi 3 Model B has been released, which features a processing brain that's 10 times faster than the original board and comes with cooked in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
The new mini computer comes in at the same price as last year's Pi 2, but includes a new Broadcom BCM2837 system-on-chip. A 50 - 60 percent bump in performance (in 32-bit mode) is promised from the 1.2 GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor at its heart, and the Pi 3 also gains a BCM43438 802.11n Wi-Fi/Bluetooth 4.1 chip despite retaining almost the same form factor as the previous Model Bs.
All of the connectors stay in the same place as before, including a 40-pin extended GPIO, Ethernet port and four USB 2.0 ports. The only change is reported to be the location of the LEDs, which now sit on the opposite side of the micro-SD card socket to make room for the antenna.
The 85 x 56 x 17 mm Pi 3 can now be hooked up to even more demanding USB devices thanks to the inclusion of a 5 V/2.5 A switched power source. Elsewhere, the mini computer has a dual-core VideoCore IV GPU that supports 1080p video decoding at 30 frames per second, 1 GB of LPDDR2 RAM, a 4 pole audio jack, a camera port and full-sized HDMI out.
The Raspberry Pi 2 is on sale now for US$35. A BCM2837-based Compute Module 3 is expected to be made available in the coming months and the Foundation says that previous Pi models will continue to be made available "as long as there's demand."
Source: Raspberry Pi Foundation
