Raspberry Pi 2: Faster Processor and Windows 10 Support for Only $35

By Jeffrey Burt

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s computing board has given rise to a broad range of projects, from robots and homemade computers to handheld game consoles and sensors in a water tank containing an electric eel that tell a Raspberry Pi computer to tweet a message every time the eel discharges an electrical current.

The Raspberry Pi 2 is the latest model that includes a faster ARM-based chip from Broadcom and twice the memory of the previous model.

Raspberry Pi engineers had been getting as much as they could from the 700MHz Broadcom BCM2835 in the previous models, including optimizing libraries and applications. However, they needed more power, and Broadcom developed the quad-core 900MHz BCM2836.

The result of using Broadcom’s new chip, based on the ARM Cortex-A7, is a system that offers six times better performance than the previous computers.

Microsoft officials want Windows 10 to expand the reach of the OS beyond PCs into such areas as tablets, two-in-one systems and Internet of things devices. Windows 10 will be offered free via the vendor’s Windows Developer Program for IoT.

Raspberry Pi officials want to give everyone the power to compute through the foundation’s credit-card-size compute modules.

The foundation in November 2014 launched the Raspberry Pi Model A+, which is smaller and even more affordable than the original Model A.

The Raspberry Pi B+ model, launched in July 2014, was the last version of the original computer, offering more USB ports and greater energy efficiency.

The Raspberry Pi Model A comes with 256MB of memory and one USB port, but no Ethernet port, and is more power-efficient than the Model B. Because of this, Model A is usually leveraged for embedded projects, according to foundation officials.

The Raspberry Pi Model B, by contrast, comes with 512MB of memory, two USB ports and an Ethernet port.