Nearly six years after the launch of the miniscule Raspberry Pi Zero, its makers have launched its successor, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.
A couple of years after introducing the $5 Zero, the Raspberry Pi Foundation debuted the $10 Zero W, which added wireless and bluetooth capability to the miniscule single board computer (SBC).
“But where our larger products have grown steadily more powerful over the years, we’ve never found a way to pack more performance into the Zero form factor. Until today,” writes Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Ltd, and creator of the original Raspberry Pi, as he introduced the Zero 2 W.
Tiny powerhouse
The new SBC measures 65mm x 30mm and packs a 1GHZ quad-core CPU that Upton claims delivers five times the performance of its predecessor.
Priced at just $15, the new board uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die used in the $35 Raspberry Pi 3, downclocked to 1Ghz, along with 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM.
Just like the Zero W, the Zero 2 W offers both wireless and Bluetooth connectivity. In terms of physical connectivity, there's a microSD card slot, CSI-2 camera connector, USB 2.0 on-the-go (OTG) port, a mini-HDMI port, and a 40-pin GPIO header.
The Zero 2 W is a drop-in drop-in replacement for the original Zero and Zero W, which also means the new board is compatible with most of the existing accessories for the Zero.
The Zero 2 W is currently available in the UK, EU, US, Canada, and Honk Kong. However Upton shares that the device isn’t immune to the global chip shortage, with only about 200,000 units up for grabs this year, and another 250,000 to follow in the first half of 2022.
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