The Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold millions of its affordable computing boards and it continues to refresh the range to enable people to do more with these boards. The flagship Raspberry Pi 3 board has been upgraded today and it brings more power and improved networking. The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ will certainly help the Foundation to sell a lot more units of its affordable computing boards.
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ has a more powerful 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor and support for Gigabit Ethernet over USB as well as dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It also features Power-over-Ethernet pins, improved thermal management and USB booting.
The processor has been bumped up from last year’s 1.2GHz chip. It says that this improvement has been made possible by the improved thermal design. The dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless connectivity as well as Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0 support up to 300Mbps which is triple the speed offered by previous boards.
Power over Ethernet (PoE) wasn’t supported on the Raspberry Pi boards until now. The Foundation is now going to launch its own PoE HAT so that component manufacturers can make use of it.
The Model B+ features all of these improvements while retaining the size of its predecessor while will enable DIYers to use the new board in the cases that they already have. Even the price is the same, the new board can be purchased for $35.