Description
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B 1GB Project Board
Perhaps the biggest change is that the new Raspberry Pi 3 comes with both built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1. That means that the new board will support Bluetooth "Classic" and, somewhat more usefully, Bluetooth LE. Which makes the new Raspberry Pi not just a desktop replacement, but a perfect hub for the emerging Internet of Things. Apart from the position of the LEDs, and the new radio chip and antenna - located between the display connector and the GPIO headers - the new board looks very similar to the Raspberry Pi 2. However there are a few interesting things to make note of about the new hardware that might not be immediately obvious from an initial inspection.
While you could always add Wi-Fi and Bluetooth USB dongles to the Raspberry Pi, building the hardware into the board simplifies everything. Previously, it would cost another $20 on top of the price of the Raspberry Pi to add third-party Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE USB adaptors; bringing the radio onboard eliminates that cost, and also gets rid of incompatible hardware and driver issues.
Almost inevitably, news of the new Raspberry Pi 3 was leaked ahead of time, rumors started to appear almost two weeks ahead of today's official launch. But like many modern technical products it was the unavoidable FCC filing for the board that gave the game away, although I'm not sure the Foundation will forgive CPC for letting people actually order the board ahead of the launch all that quickly.
Features:
- Quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 clocked at 1.2 GHz
- Roughly 50% faster than Raspberry Pi 2
- 802.11n Wireless LAN
- Bluetooth 4.1 (including Bluetooth Low Energy)
- 400MHz VideoCore IV multimedia
- 1GB LPDDR2-900 SDRAM (i.e. 900MHz)
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