Raspberry Pi 2 Announced – Will Support Windows 10 (Sort Of)

After three years, the Raspberry Pi foundation has released the long-awaited version 2 of the venerable micro PC, and it’s quite the upgrade. The processor remains of a similar architecture to maintain compatibility with the very large software library that’s been built up over the years. Switching from a single-core 700MHz ARM6 to a quad-core 900MHz ARM7 processor, doubling the 512MB of RAM to 1GB, but keeping the VideoCore IV 3D for multimedia. Most amazing of all, it keeps the same $35 price!

The Raspberry Pi 2 will launch with the Model B, which will look almost the same as the existing Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+, in that it will have 4 USB ports, Ethernet and the extended GPIO. The new CPU results in an average performance increase of about 6-fold.

Apart from the massive announcement from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, one thing sticks out, the announced support for Windows 10 (as well as Ubuntu). While support for Microsoft’s latest OS is of major significance, it does need to be taken with a modicum of rational thinking. We’re not talking the widely familiar x86 desktop variant here. At the same time, Microsoft effectively killed off the RT strain of its OS for ARM based systems when it announced the Surface 3; so what does that leave us?

Dig around a little bit and you will find Microsoft’s latest endeavor, Windows 10 for IoT – the IoT standing for ‘Internet of Things’. Effectively, this is Windows RT with a new name. Details are thin at present as to the capabilities of the new OS, but it’s likely to include the same App Store as RT, and provide a stepping-stone for developers to all things Windows.

With the new hardware in place and the inclusion of Windows 10, the Raspberry Pi may make even more headway into getting the world hooked on cheap and ubiquitous personal computing.