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Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W unveiled – successor to cheapest single board computer

It’s been almost six years since Raspberry Pi released the Zero single board computer for just $ 5. Of all the company’s products, this model was the most closely aligned with the basic principles of the project. This was followed by the $ 10 Zero W wireless board, which was widely used in almost everything from smart speakers to ventilators. But as requirements gradually grew, and it was not possible to increase performance in the Zero form factor, the Zero 2 W was born.

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC as the base version of the Raspberry Pi 3. However, to reduce power consumption, the processor frequency has been reduced from 1.4 GHz to 1 GHz. The chipset also includes 512MB of LPDDR2 RAM. According to the results of multi-threaded testing sysbench, the computer’s performance has increased almost fivefold.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W specifications:

  • SoC Broadcom BCM2710A1 (four Cortex-A53 processor cores @ 1 GHz);
  • RAM 512 MB LPDDR2 SDRAM;
  • microSD, mini HDMI, two microUSB (USB 2.0 with OTG), outputs for composite video and camera (CSI-2), 40-pin GPIO connector;
  • Wi-Fi 2,4 ГГц IEEE 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2 и BLE.

The chipset-integrated graphics accelerator supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, offers acceleration for H.264 and MPEG-4 1080p30 video decoding, and H.264 encoding. To avoid problems with excessive heat generation, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W has added thick copper layers to conduct and dissipate heat from the processor. This added weight to the board, but provided more consistent performance. In addition, the board was shielded in the place where the wireless chips are located to protect it from external interference. In addition to all this, the company has released a new power supply with a microUSB connector instead of Type-C with a reduced peak current of 2.5 A.

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is already available in Europe, UK, US, Canada and Hong Kong for $ 15. Later, the novelty will appear in other countries. The company intends to release about 200 thousand devices this year and the same number in the first half of 2022.

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