Lancement du Raspberry Pi 2,

PC low cost six fois plus puissant que son prédécesseur

Le lancement du premier Raspberry Pi, un miniordinateur low

cost, avait déclenché un tel engouement en 2012 qu'il
fallait attendre jusqu'à six mois pour obtenir son exemplaire. Trois
ans plus tard, la fondation à l'origine du projet vient d'annoncer la
mise en vente du Raspberry Pi 2, au même prix que l'ancienne
version, le Rasberry Pi B+ : 35 dollars, soit environ 31 euros.
Un produit six fois plus puissant, assure-t-elle, équipé d'un processeur ARMv7 900MHZ.
Il disposera également d'une mémoire vive deux fois plus importante, avec 1 gigabit de
RAM, contre 512 mégabits pour la version précédente.
Le Raspberry Pi 2 sera compatible avec plusieurs distributions Linux mais aussi avec
Windows 10. Les deux premières versions du Raspberry resteront quant à elles
toujours disponibles, au même prix.
En savoir plus sur http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/breve/2015/02/02/lancement-du-raspberry-pi-2-pc-low-cost-six-fois-plus-puissant-que-son-
predecesseur_4567866_4408996.html#7dlwwOwRmDXB3rCk.99

RASPBERRY PI 2 ON SALE NOW AT $35

 706 Comments

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way above the fold. Raspberry Pi 2 is now on sale for $35 (the same price as the existing
Model B+), featuring:

 A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU (~6x performance)

 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM (2x memory)

 Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1

Because it has an ARMv7 processor, it can run the full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions, including Snappy Ubuntu
Core, as well as Microsoft Windows 10.
BCM2836 AND RASPBERRY PI 2

Since we launched the original Raspberry Pi Model B, back in 2012, we’ve done an enormous amount of software work to
get the best out of our Broadcom BCM2835 application processor and its 700MHz ARM11 CPU. We’ve spent a lot of money
on optimising a wide variety of open-source libraries and applications, including WebKit, LibreOffice, Scratch, Pixman,
XBMC/Kodi, libav and PyPy. At the same time, the Raspbian project, run by Peter Green and Mike Thompson, has provided
us with an ARMv6-compatible rebuild of Debian with hardware floating point support, and Gordon, Dom and Jonathan have
spent thousands of hours working on the firmware and board support to make Raspberry Pi the most stable single board
computer in the world. It’s worth going back and trying out an old SD card image from 2012 to get an idea of how far we’ve
come.

Nonetheless, there comes a point when there’s no substitute for more memory and CPU performance. Our challenge was to
figure out how to get this without throwing away our investment in the platform or spoiling all those projects and tutorials
which rely on the precise details of the Raspberry Pi hardware. Fortunately for us, Broadcom were willing to step up with a
new SoC, BCM2836. This retains all the features of BCM2835, but replaces the single 700MHz ARM11 with a 900MHz
quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 complex: everything else remains the same, so there is no painful transition or reduction in
stability.

First silicon arrived last year, as we can see in this professionally shot video from bringup night:

Once we were confident that BCM2836 was performing as expected, James designed a series of prototypes, before we
settled on the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B that launches today. This has an identical form-factor to the existing Raspberry Pi 1
Model B+, but manages to pack in both the new BCM2836 and a full 1GB of SDRAM from our friends at Micron. All of the
connectors are in the same place and have the same functionality, and the board can still be run from a 5V micro-USB
power adapter.

Raspberry Pi 2 is available to buy today from our partners element14 and RS Components. Remember you’ll need an
updated NOOBS or Raspbian image including an ARMv7 kernel and modules from our downloads page. At launch, we are
using the same ARMv6 Raspbian userland on both Raspberry Pi 1 and 2; over the next few months we will investigate
whether we can obtain higher performance from regular ARMv7 Debian, or whether we can selectively replace a small
number of libraries to get the best of both worlds. Now that we’re using an ARMv7 core, we can also run Ubuntu: a Snappy
Ubuntu Core image is available now and a package for NOOBS will be available in the next couple of weeks.

WINDOWS 10

For the last six months we’ve been working closely with Microsoft to bring the forthcoming Windows 10 to Raspberry Pi 2.
Microsoft will have much more to share over the coming months. The Raspberry Pi 2-compatible version of Windows 10 will
be available free of charge to makers.

Visit WindowsOnDevices.com today to join the Windows Developer Program for IoT and receive updates as they become
available.

FAQS

We’ll keep updating this list over the next couple of days, but here are a few to get you started.

Are you discontinuing the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B and B+?

No. We have a lot of industrial customers who will want to stick with Raspberry Pi 1 for the time being. We’ll keep building
Raspberry Pi 1 Model B and Model B+ as long as there’s demand for it. Both these boards will continue to sell for $35.
What about Model A+?
Model A+ continues to be the $20 entry-level Raspberry Pi for the time being. Although the new board is called Raspberry Pi
2 Model B, we have no plans to introduce a Raspberry Pi 2 Model A before the end of 2015.

What about the Compute Module?

We expect to introduce a BCM2836-based Compute Module in the medium term, but for now we’re focused on getting
Raspberry Pi 2 Model B out of the door.

Are you still using VideoCore?

Yes. VideoCore IV 3d is the only publicly documented 3d graphics core for ARM-based SoCs, and we want to make
Raspberry Pi more open over time, not less.

Where does the “6x performance” figure come from?

The speedup varies between applications. We’ve seen single-threaded CPU benchmarks that speed up by as little as 1.5x,
while Sunspider is around 4x faster, and NEON-enabled multicore video codecs can be over 20x faster. 6x is a typical figure
for a multi-threaded CPU benchmark like SysBench.

Is this a full version of Windows 10?

Please refer to WindowsOnDevices.com.

CREDITS

A project like this requires a vast amount of focused work from a large team over an extended period. A partial list of those
who made major direct contributions to the BCM2836 chip program and Raspberry Pi 2 follows: James Adams, Leo
Azevedo, Jonathan Bell, Alex Bradbury, Dom Cobley, Steve Cook, Dave Collins, Phil Elwell, Gordon Hollingworth, Andrew
Holme, Tammy Julyan, John Kelly, Walter Kho, Yung-Ching Lee, Gert van Loo, Ian Macaulay, Paul Manser, Simon Martin,
Luca Di Mauro, Akshaye Sama, Andrew Scheller, Serge Schneider, Mark Scoones, Shawn Shadburn, Paul Sherry, Mike
Stimson, Stuart Thompson, Roger Thornton, Madhu Thottupura, James Turner, Nidhi Varshneya, Andrew West. If you’re not
on this list and think you should be, please let me know, and accept my apologies.

If you’re in front of a computer at 9am GMT and for a while after, you can watch usannouncing the Raspberry Pi 2 live, and
submit questions for us.