Monday, February 2, 2015

Raspberry Pi 2 gets quad-core and 1GB RAM... and Windows 10 love

The small and highly popular Raspberry Pi finally gets a much needed refresh that will speed up millions of projects around the world, and it even gets to run a Windows 10 version... for free.

The new and improved Raspberry Pi 2 replaces the old Broadcom BCM2835 with a newer BMC2836, which now comes with a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU, which should provide a very welcome speed boost (you can expect a 6x improvement on average, though it can be much more) and also doubles the RAM to 1GB.

Physically, the RPI 2 is identical to the latest Model B+ which should help the upgrade process for most of the projects - and best of all, it will be available at no extra cost: $35. And if by any chance you do need to use the previous versions, you'll be glad to know that the original Model B e B+ will still be available for as long as there's demand for it

With a ARMv7 CPU, there are now lots of other possibilities for people to use the Raspberry Pi 2, including using the "full" Debian instead of the ARMv6 Raspbian), or even try Snappy Ubuntu Core. But perhaps more surprisingly, there will also be the chance to run Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi 2... for free.


Don't expect it to be a full-fledged Windows 10 as on a desktop. This is a Windows 10 for the "internet of things" devices, but even so it shows that Microsoft doesn't want to give up that market to Linux without a fight.

Anyway, for now, if you felt your overclocked Raspberry Pi was still lagging on the XBMC interface, you're just $35 away from a very nice upgrade that should improve things a lot. :)

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