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Monday, February 29, 2016

Raspberry Pi 3 moves to 64bits with ARM Cortex-A53 - video

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

The third generation Raspberry Pi has moved to 64bits and adds both Bluetooth and WiFi.

The Raspberry Pi 3 has ten times the performance of the original board and is based on the Broadcom BCM2837 SoC, which includes an ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor running at 1.2GHz, alongside a BCM43438 combo connectivity device, which provides 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy. BCM2837 integrates a dual-core VideoCore IV multimedia coprocessor, which provides:

·       1.2Gpixels/s of fill rate, 1.8Gtexel/s of texturing rate
·       29GFLOPs of shader compute throughput
·       OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 support
·       1080p60 hardware video decoding
·       1080p30 hardware video encoding
·       A hardware image sensor pipeline

The board is manufactured by RS Components http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=raspberrypi and http://www.alliedelec.com/raspberry-pi/ and is aimed at embedded industrial applications, in homes and in schools and colleges worldwide. 

Building upon the phenomenal success of its predecessors - the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-microcontroller-development-kits/8111284/ and Raspberry Pi 2 Model B http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-microcontroller-development-kits/832-6274/ - the Raspberry Pi 3 has significantly upgraded processing capabilities to deliver 50% more performance than Raspberry Pi 2 and approximately ten times more than the original Raspberry Pi 1, allowing it to run even higher-end applications.

The Raspberry Pi 3 boots from a micro SD card and uses the NOOBS (New Out Of the Box Software) installation manager. The standard Raspbian operating system install comes bundled with a range of productivity applications, and programming tools including Node-RED; this visual tool provides support for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services, making the board ideal for the rapid development and prototyping of IoT projects.

It has the same footprint as previous Raspberry Pi incarnations - with its credit-card-sized dimensions of 85 x 56 x 17mm - the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B retains many of the same features and capabilities of the previous generation. These include: a 40-pin GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) connector; four USB connector port; full-HD HDMI; 10/100 Ethernet; 3.5mm audio jack and composite video; camera (CSI-2) and display (DSI) interfaces; and micro-SD card slot. Power input to the board is via its micro-USB socket requiring an external, plug-in power supply unit (PSU).



"We are unveiling the third-generation Raspberry Pi four years to the day after the launch of the original Raspberry Pi board on February 29, 2012," said Eben Upton, founder of Raspberry Pi. "It also marks the four-year anniversary of our highly successful relationship with RS and Allied, which have played a significant role in its success as leading and trusted sources of products, technologies and information for professional engineers, hobbyists and those looking to make their first steps into the work of programming."

"Raspberry Pi has taken another important step in its evolution," said Lindsley Ruth, Chief Executive Officer at Electrocomponents. "Based on the robust and well proven combination of hardware and software of the Raspberry Pi platform, this latest generation board delivers even more processing power together with embedded wireless connectivity, plus software to make it easy for businesses or individuals to develop applications for the Internet of Things. RS and Allied are honoured to once again embark upon another new chapter as a distribution partner for the Raspberry Pi Foundation."

The new Raspberry Pi 3 offered by RS and Allied is manufactured exclusively in the UK under licence by the distributor. A Raspberry Pi 3 Compute Module I/O Board will also be available shortly from RS and Allied, enabling OEMs to develop their own Raspberry Pi 3 based solutions for many industrial applications.


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