Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi Founder and CEO, announced Monday that the new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B+ is available for a $35 (the same price as the existing Model B+). It provides real bang for the buck with a 900MHz quad-core system-on-chip and 1GB of RAM-taking palm-sized computers to a whole new level.

The Raspberry Pi 2 features:

  • A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
  • 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM (2x memory)
  • Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1

Upton wrote on the company blog, "Because it has an ARMv7 processor, it can run the full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions, including Snappy Ubuntu Core, as well as Microsoft Windows 10."

The new version is reportedly six times faster than the old model. In a recent interview with The Register, Upton explained that "it's a usable PC now. 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."

The original Raspberry Pi Model B was launched in 2012. Upton said the company has done an enormous amount of software work to achieve the best out of their Broadcom BCM2835 application processor and its 700MHz ARM11 CPU. The work included optimizing a vast array of open-source applications and libraries, including WebKit, Scratch, LibreOffice, Pixman, libav, PyPy and XBMC/Kodi. Meanwhile, the Raspbian project with its ARMv6-compatible rebuild of Debian with hardware floating point supports, firmware and board support have made the Raspberry Pi "the most stable single board computer in the world," he said.

He said it is worth trying out an old SD card image from 2012 to get an idea of how far the company has come.

Best of all, Upton said Broadcom stepped up with a new SoC, BCM2836 which preserves all the features of BCM2835, but replaces the single 700MHz ARM11 with a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 complex. "Everything else remains the same, so there is no painful transition or reduction in stability," he said.

The new Pi 2 is on sale now for $35, with 100,000 units available the first run.

Upton says the company will continue to build Raspberry Pi 1 Model B and Model B+ so long as there's demand.

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