Raspberry Pi 3 With 64-Bit CPU, Bluetooth 4.1 and more Launched at $35

The Raspberry Pi Foundation celebrate their fourth birthday today. The Raspberry Pi foundation has launched the third version of its popular low-power Raspberry Pi development platform, the Raspberry Pi 3. It’s priced at $35(approx Rs 2,400), the same as the Raspberry Pi 2 mini computer unveiled last year, but adds a much request feature – integrated Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth connectivity. “In celebration of our fourth birthday, we thought it would be fun to release something new.”, wrote the foundation in a blog post.

Raspberry Pi 3 will go on sale starting Monday from element14 and RS Components, and other resellers.

The biggest highlights of the Raspberry Pi 3 is that there’s now built-in 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1 alongside the existing wired 10/100 Ethernet connection, which is a bonus on a number of different levels.

In terms of specifications, the device is quite powerful – the Raspberry Pi 3 features a 64-bit, 1.2GHz quad-core Broadcom BCM2837 SoC based on ARM’s Cortex-A53 CPU architecture, which the company says has the 10x performance of the Raspberry Pi 1.

“The 900MHz 32-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU complex has been replaced by a custom-hardened 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53. Combining a 33% increase in clock speed with various architectural enhancements, this provides a 50-60% increase in performance in 32-bit mode versus Raspberry Pi 2, or roughly a factor of ten over the original Raspberry Pi,” said Raspberry Pi Founder Eben Upton.

The rest of the features haven’t changed from Raspberry Pi 2. The Raspberry Pi 3 has an HDMI port, ethernet, MicroSD and four USB ports. It runs a Broadcom VideoCore IV 3D graphics processor that can play 1080p video at 60 frames per second, and has 40 GPIO pins, and display and camera interfaces.

The full specifications of the Raspberry Pi 3 are as follows:

• New Broadcom BCM2837RIFBG SoC: 64-bit, 1.2GHz, quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU
• 400MHz VideoCore IV multimedia
• 1GB LPDDR2-900 SDRAM
• Single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 4
• Price: £28 inc VAT
• 1GB LPDDR2-900 SDRAM (@ 900MHz)
• $35 (approx Rs 2,400)