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Forget cake – Raspberry Pi 3 made to celebrate fourth birthday

Raspberry Pi is celebrating its fourth birthday, and what better way to do so than to announce the Raspberry Pi 3?

The third iteration of the hobbyist favourite Raspberry Pi computer adds some advanced features without adding at all to the price of last year’s model, the Raspberry Pi 2.

It comes packing a 64-bit quad-core CPU in the Broadcom BCM2837, for one thing. This brings it roughly up to the standard of current top-end smartphones and offering ten times the performance of the original Raspberry Pi.

Despite this, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton is eager to assure customers that the new chip is built on the same basic architecture as its predecessors. This should minimise disruption to previous hardware-reliant Raspberry Pi projects.

But the biggest addition this time around is Wi-Fi, with an integrated 802.11n wireless LAN module. You also get Bluetooth 4.1 as standard.

Related: Raspberry Pi 2 vs BBC Micro Bit

All of this, and the Raspberry Pi 3 is available for the same price as the Raspberry Pi 2 – just $35, or £22.85. The Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2 Model B will continue to be sold for $25 and $35 respectively.

It’s been four years to the day since the original Raspberry Pi launched into an unsuspecting market. The range has gone on to sell eight million units, making it the best-selling UK computer ever, as well as kicking off a whole new market for affordable and heavily customisable computers for enthusiasts and would-be-enthusiasts.

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