Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W arrives with more power and design improvements

The Raspberry Pi Project has unveiled the next generation of the board Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, combining compact dimensions with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi compatibility and is manufactured in the same miniature form factor (65 x 30 x 5mm), which is about half the size of a normal Raspberry Pi.

The difference key among the new Raspberry Pi Zero model is the transition to using the Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC, which is close to that used in Raspberry Pi 3 boards (in the previous generation of Zero boards, the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC was supplied, as in the first Raspberry Pi).

Unlike the Raspberry Pi 3, the processor frequency has been reduced from 1,4 GHz to 1 GHz to reduce power consumption. Judging from the multi-threaded sysbench test, SoC upgrade allowed to increase motherboard performance by 5 times (The new SoC uses a quad-core 53-bit Arm Cortex-A64 CPU instead of a 11-bit single-core ARM1176 ARM32JZF.)

As in the previous edition, The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W offers 512MB of RAM, a Mini-HDMI port, two Micro-USB ports (USB 2.0 with OTG and a port for power supply), a microSD slot, one 40-pin GPIO connector (no soldering), composite video and camera pins (CSI-2).

The plate is equipped with a wireless chip compatible with Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n (2.4GHz), Bluetooth 4.2 and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). For FCC certification and protection against external interference, the wireless chip on the new board is covered with a metal casing.

The GPU integrated in the SoC is compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, and provides tools to accelerate dvideo encoding in H.264 and MPEG-4 formats with 1080p30 quality, as well as the encoding in H.264 format, which expands the range of use of the board by various devices and multimedia systems for a smart home.

Unfortunately, RAM size is limited to 512MB and it cannot be increased due to the physical limitations of the size of the plate. Providing 1GB of RAM would require the use of a complicated multi-layered design, which developers are not yet ready to implement.

The main problem on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W board design was the solution to the problem of the location of the memory LPDDR2 SDRAM. In the first generation of the board, the memory was placed in an additional layer above the SoC chip, implemented using PoP (package-on-package) technology, but in the new Broadcom chips this technique could not be implemented due to the increase SoC size. To solve the problem, a special version of the chip was developed in cooperation with Broadcom, in which the memory was integrated into the SoC.

Another problem was increased heat dissipation due to the use of a more powerful processor. The problem solved by adding thick layers of copper to the board to remove and dissipate heat from the processor. Because of this, the weight of the table increased markedly, but the technique was recognized as successful and turned out to be sufficient to prevent overheating when performing a LINPACK linear algebra unlimited time stress test at a room temperature of 20 degrees.

Of the competing devices, the closest is the Orange Pi zero Plus2 measuring 46x48mm and costing $ 35 with 512MB of RAM and an Allwinner H3 chip.

So far, sales have only started in the UK, the European Union, the US, Canada and Hong Kong; deliveries to other countries will be opened when the wireless module is certified. The cost of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is $ 15 (for comparison, the cost of the Raspberry Pi Zero W board is $ 10 and the Raspberry Pi Zero is $ 5, the production of cheaper boards will continue) .

Finally If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link.


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