he Raspberry Pi ultra-barebones PC has a price and a shipping date, according to the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog. The first batch of Raspberry Pi boards are coming off the manufacturing line on Feb. 20 and the tiny PCs will be made available in the U.K. by the end of this month.
The first Raspberry Pi PCs will be priced at $35 a pop, up from the $25 per unit that developers Eben Upton, David Braben, and the rest of the Raspberry Pi team originally projected when they unveiled plans for a USB stick-sized personal computer last spring.
The first units were actually supposed to ship earlier, but the foundation explained in its blog post Monday that the original quartz crystal packaging for the Raspberry Pi boards has been switched out for a different model and those parts are currently somewhat scarce in China, where the computers are being assembled.
The foundation this week also released a datasheet for Broadcom’s ARM-based BCM2835 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that powers the tiny computer. Developers and customers looking to port their operating systems to Raspberry Pi devices are encouraged to wade through the dense particulars of the datasheet, which PCMag sister publication Geek.com has had a look at.
The non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation created these tiny computers as a means to get a PC into the hands of children around —a project similar to that of One Laptop Per Child, but at price points that are a fraction of OLPC’s.
Eben, who developed the first proto-Raspberry Pi back in 2006, and Braben, whose background is in video game development, created a working PC that’s about as basic as you can get and still run a standard Linux operating system. The original prototype had a 700MHz ARM11 processor slapped onto a tiny motherboard, roughly the size of a USB stick, with 128MB of SDRAM. Users can hook up a display to the HDMI port attached to one end of the little computer, which is capable of playing video rendered by OpenGL ES 2.0 at up to a 1080P resolution.
From UK Gamer
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mDuJuvZjI&w=480&h=274]
We’re not claiming for a second that Doom 3 will run smoothly (although it won’t stop me trying) but Minecraft, Neverwinter Nights, many of the free to play MMOs, classics like Duke Nukem 3D, retro video game emulators and, as proved below, Quake 3 tournament could/should run out at decent frame rates.