Raspberry Pi 2 Goes Quad Core

Feb. 2, 2015

Raspberry Pi 2 is now available. It moves up to a quad core Broadcom processor and includes 1 Gbyte of RAM. It also gains Windows 10 support.

William G. Wong

The Raspberry Pi 2 has arrived. It is a major improvement over the Raspberry Pi B+ (see “Raspberry Pi B+ Gets A+”) that provided a new layout four USB ports along with an HDMI and 10/100 Ethernet port. The Raspberry Pi 2 (Fig. 1) includes the same 40-pin header and microSD slot. It doubles the amount of RAM to 1 Gbytes but the big change is a move to the 900 MHz, quad core, Broadcom BCM2836.

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Figure 1. The Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad core Broadcom BCM2836 and 1 Gbytes of RAM.

The Broadcom BCM2836 has a GPU, DSP and four, 32-bit ARMv7 cores. It is six times faster than the prior Raspberry Pi versions. The board also has a 4 pole stereo output and a composite video port in addition to the 1080p HDMI port. Additional I/O includes a CSI camera port and a DSI display port for connecting the Raspberry Pi touch screen display.

Non-volatile storage is provided via a Micro-SD socket compared to the BeagleBone Black that has a 2 Gbytes of e.MMC flash and a 1 GHz, single core, Texas Instrument’s AM335x system (see “Arduino, Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone?”). The BeagleBone Black also has a microSD slot.

Element 14 has bundles that include an 8 Gbyte microSD card with NOOBS (new out of the box software) that makes set up easy. There is a plethora of options available including Linux variants like Arch Linux. Raspian (based on Debian), Ubuntu or Pidora (Fedora remix) plus non-Linux options like RICS OS.

One interesting twist is a new announcement from Microsoft that Windows 10 was going to support Raspberry Pi 2. It is not available yet so you will have to choose one of the prior options if you get a board soon. Mine is in the mail but I will let you know how it fairs with Windows 10 in the future.

The Raspberry Pi 2 is available from Element 14 for $35. It is definitely a game changer.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.