Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
The Raspberry Pi is now manufactured in the United Kingdom, leading to the
creation of many new jobs.
The release of the Raspberry Pi was met with great fanfare, and the two original
retailers of the Raspberry Pi - Premier Farnell and RS components-sold out of the
first batch within minutes.
The Raspberry Pi hardware
At the heart of Raspberry Pi is the powerful Broadcom BCM2835 "system on a
chip". The BCM2835 is similar to the chip at the heart of almost every smartphone
and set top box in the world that uses ARM architecture. The BCM2835 CPU on
the Raspberry Pi runs at 700 MHz and its performance is roughly equivalent to a
300 MHz Pentium II computer that was available back in 1999.
To put this in perspective, the guidance computer used in the Apollo missions was
less powerful than a pocket calculator!
AUDIO
LEDS
RCA VIDEO
LAN
USB
GPIO
256MB RAM
CPU & GPU
HDMI
SD CARD
P
O
WER
Block diagram of the Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi comes with either 256 MB or 512 MB of RAM, depending on
which model you buy. Hopefully, this will increase in future versions!
Graphic capabilities
Graphics in the Raspberry Pi are provided by a Videocore 4 GPU. The graphic
performance of the
graphics
processing
unit
(
GPU
) is roughly equivalent to the Xbox,
launched in 2011, which cost many hundreds of dollars. These might seem like very
low specifications, but they are enough to play Quake 3 at 1080p and full HD movies.
