Ahead of this weekend’s 4th birthday of the original Raspberry Pi, RS-Components announced the availability of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B in South Africa.
The original Raspberry Pi Model B launched on 29th February 2012 with 256MB on-board memory with only 10,000 units scheduled to be produced for sale, of which only 2,000 were delivered to RS-Components in the back of the developers’ car. The demand for the unit was overwhelming, and has, to date, shipped over 5 million units, 30,000 in South Africa alone, across its spectrum of Pi units, despite the weakened Rand.
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is available online at RS-Components for R642, compared to the dollar price of $35. The units has the following specifications:
| Processor | Broadcom BCM2387 chipset, 1.2GHz Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A53.802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1 (Bluetooth Classic and LE) |
|---|---|
| GPU | Dual Core VideoCore IV® Multimedia Co-Processor. Provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode. Capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure |
| Memory | 1GB LPDDR2 |
| Operating System | Boots from Micro SD card, running a version of the Linux operating system or Windows 10 IoT |
| Dimensions | 85 x 56 x 17mm |
| Power | Micro USB socket 5V1, 2.5A |
I’ve always wanted one of these. Now with the beefier (if that is a word) I want one even more.
I’ve been running my original Model B as a media player for 4 years and still going strong.
I’m also keen on the Pi Zero soon to be released as well.
And yes, beefier is a word, exactly how you meant it.