When the first Raspberry Pi came out in 2012, it was the culmination of a major effort to build a cheap, accessible compute platform for anyone to hack and program. Today, the Raspberry Pi foundation has announced a massive upgrade to its initial chip that will dramatically improve performance and capabilities.

The first Raspberry Pi was a single-core ARMv11 processor with 128MB of RAM. The RBP2, in contrast, is a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor with 1GB of RAM. Between the clock increase and the core improvements, the new Raspberry Pi could be 40-60% faster than the old RBP in single-threaded code. Add the multi-core capabilities, and this second generation chip should be three to four times faster in total. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is claiming a sixfold speedup, with performance ranging from 1.5 times faster in single-threaded code to four times in Sunspider. NEON-enabled tests, which the ARM Cortex-A7 supports, can run 20 times faster.

The one block that isn’t changing is the VideoCore IV GPU. The Foundation believes that keeping the GPU fully documented is more important than changing other features. There’s no word on whether or not the GPU core received other performance benefits like an increased clock speed.

Introducing Windows 10

Here’s a huge bullet point in the RBP’s favor: This new device will run Windows 10, and Microsoft will be providing a free copy to RBP 10 users. It’s not clear precisely how this support will work, Microsoft is classifying it as “Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2,” but the program is operating through Windows 10’s Internet of Things portal, not through the standard Windows 10 page.

Windows 10 support isn’t as big a deal as it might have seemed a few years ago, given the total dearth of software that runs on the Windows RT operating environment, but this does open the door to a potential version of Microsoft Office running on Raspberry Pi, as well as other ultra-cheap Windows boxes. The maker community might turn up its noses at such offers, but the ability to interface with the Windows environment expands the device’s flexibility and usefulness, whether most creators take advantage of it or not.

The new Raspberry Pi is already available as of this writing. The current operating environments are still mostly optimized for the original Raspberry Pi, but the foundation notes that it will begin to transition to ARMv7 libraries in the very near future and is evaluating Debian to see if it can get better performance from that OS. Ubuntu can also now run on the RBP — Snappy Ubuntu Core is now available and a package for NOOBS will be coming “in a couple of weeks.”

The original Raspberry Pi, RBP B, and RBP B+ will all remain on sale for the foreseeable future to support existing consumers and industrial customers. The original RBP A+ will remain on sale at the $20 price point. The RBP 2 retains all of the previous features of the Raspberry Pi, including its four USB ports, 40 GPIO pins, HDMI output, Ethernet jack, 3.5mm audio jack, and microSD card slot.

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