From hundreds or thousands of units to hundreds OF thousands – that’s how demand for the Raspberry Pi has grown. The first 700 has shipped, with another 7,000 shipping within the next few weeks.
The Raspberry Pi is the size of a credit card and runs on an ARM11 chip with Fedora Linux off an SD card.
Raspberry Pi Foundation, the developers of the credit-card sized computer board, had expected sales going into hundreds – at most a few thousands if the product caught on.
How do I order a Raspberry Pi?
You can buy the Raspberry Pi through Premier Farnell/Element 14 and RS Components. Both distributors sell globally.
So they were understandably surprised when a queue of some 280,000 worldwide signed up on their website to express interest in purchasing the Raspberry Pi once shipping commenced.
RS Components, one of two distributors for the single-board computer, estimates the first 75,000 of these orders to ship by July or August this year, while the rest of the 280,000 (and still counting) will have to wait even longer.
| Model | Price | Configuration |
|---|---|---|
| Model A | US$25 | 1x USB port, no Ethernet port |
| Model B | US$35 | 2x USB ports, 1x Ethernet port |
The bottleneck for the supply chain is the ARM chip from Broadcom, which, takes up nearly 60% of the material cost of the Raspberry Pi which is manufactured in Taiwan and China.
Raspberry Pi designers already have ideas about Version 2 of the ultra-budget computer but they are not in a hurry to start work on that.
The current specs for the Raspberry Pi is more than enough to last a long time for the tasks it is designed for: computer programming, game playing, and watching HD movies.
Eben Upton, one of the designers of Raspberry Pi, has managed to play Quake 3 off the Raspberry Pi.
Upton, together with his colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, had conceived the idea of making a tiny and cheap computer for kids back in 2006.
Where can I find more information?
You can download the Raspberry Pi “Getting Started Guide” here or visit the Raspberry Pi website for more information.
They were concerned with the declining numbers and skills levels of A-Level students applying to read Computer Science at the prestigious university.
They wanted to make possible and available an affordable device that kids could play with to explore and experience computer programming.
Main technical specifications are listed below.
| Main features of the Raspberry Pi |
|---|
| Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU |
| GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode |
| GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure |
| 256MB RAM |
| Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux |
| 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket |
| HDMI socket |
| USB 2.0 socket (x2) |
| RCA video socket |
| SD card socket |
| Powered from microUSB socket |
| 3.5mm audio out jack |
| Header footprint for camera connection |
| Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm |
Tags: board, computer, Raspberry Pi, RS