It’s been nearly six years since we unleashed the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero on an unsuspecting world. Of all the products we’ve launched, Zero is still the one I’m proudest of: it most perfectly embodies our mission to give people access to tools, and to eliminate cost as a barrier. We’ve sold nearly four million units of Zero, and its $10 wireless-enabled big brother Zero W, and they’ve made their way into everything from smart speakers to hospital ventilators. But where our larger products have grown steadily more powerful over the years, we’ve never found a way to pack more performance into the Zero form factor. Until today.
Priced at $15, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die as the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3, with Arm cores slightly down-clocked to 1GHz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512 MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM. The exact performance uplift over Zero varies across workloads, but for multi-threaded sysbench it is almost exactly five times faster.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is available to buy today from our network of Approved Resellers. If you are a subscriber to The MagPi, you’ll be receiving a free Zero 2 W in the next few days; all new subscribers will receive a unit as a welcome gift.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W specifications
- Broadcom BCM2710A1, quad-core 64-bit SoC (Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1GHz)
- 512 MB LPDDR2 SDRAM
- 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, BLE
- 1 × USB 2.0 interface with OTG
- HAT-compatible 40 pin I/O header footprint
- MicroSD card slot
- Mini HDMI port
- Composite video and reset pin solder points
- CSI-2 camera connector
- H.264, MPEG-4 decode (1080p30); H.264 encode (1080p30)
- OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics
If a lot of this looks familiar, it’s because Simon Martin, who designed both Zero 2 W, and the RP3A0 package that powers it, has been able to squeeze all this extra performance into the original Zero form factor. Almost all cases and accessories designed for Zero should work perfectly with the new board, including our own case and selection of cables.
