Raspberry Pi Fits More power into its 2 W board

Raspberry Pi introduced a new version of its tiny wireless Zero W board, the Zero 2 W, with much-improved performance, added features and a slightly higher $15 price tag. It uses a downclocked version of the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC dies used in the $35 Raspberry Pi 3, along with 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM. With that, it delivers a significant performance boost over the original Zero, up to five times faster for multithreaded chores.

The device comes with 2.4Ghz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, a USB 2.0 interface, a MicroSD card slot, Mini HDMI port, a CSI-2 camera connector, a HAT-compatible 40 pin I/O header, OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics and H.264 1080p 30 encode and decode capabilities.  The company introduced a new official Raspberry Pi Zero 2 USB power supply unit ($8) that can also power the Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is now available to buy in the UK, EU, US, Canada and Hong Kong for $15 / £13.50.

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 Hong 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.