The new Raspberry Pi 2, now with Windows 10 support
The humble Raspberry Pi, the board that has taught countless people (adults and children alike) to program and which powers innumerable homebrew hacks and project, has received a hardware upgrade that makes it ready to run a custom version of Windows 10.
AR + VR
One of the keys to making Windows 10 run on the Raspberry Pi platform is better hardware. The new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B has at its heart a quad-core ARMv7 processor that is said to be six times more powerful than the old Model B+ version.
Raspberry Pi 2 spec:
- A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 BCM2836 CPU (up from a single-core 700Mhz part)
- 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM (up from 512MB)
- Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1 (software will need to be recompiled to take advantage of the new multi-core processor)
- Identical form factor to the existing Raspberry Pi, which means it can fit into existing enclosures
- 10/100 Ethernet port
- 40-pin extended GPIO
- 4 x USB 2.0 ports
- 4 pole Stereo output and Composite video port
- Full size HDMI
- CSI camera port for connecting the Raspberry Pi camera
- DSI display port for connecting the Raspberry Pi touch screen display
- Micro SD slot
- Micro USB power source
- Price: $35
Microsoft has announced that it is developing a custom version of the Windows 10 operating system and that this will be released free of charge to the Maker community through the Windows Developer Program for IoT.
Microsoft will share more details about this Windows 10 version "in the coming months."
If you're interested, head over to the Microsoft IoT dev page to sign up.
An interesting side effect of this announcement by Microsoft is that Windows on ARM is far from dead.
The Raspberry Pi 2 will continue to run NOOBS and Raspbian in addition to Windows 10, as well as full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions.
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