It’s been almost six years since the Raspberry Pi company launched the Pi Zero, which was followed up with the wireless Zero W model. Since then, it’s been the smallest, least expensive computer sold by the company, with plenty of power for running everything from a motion-tracking security cam to an emulation console.
Now, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is here, offering a significant improvement to the original. It uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC that was used on the launch version of the Raspberry Pi 3, though with CPU cores that are slightly downclocked. The higher performance, however, doesn’t come from an expanded board.
“Single-threaded performance is approximately 40% faster than a normal Raspberry Pi Zero. Obviously, this is quite cool, but if you do a benchmark of the single-core on a Raspberry Pi Zero and compare it to the quad-core of Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, you get more than five times the performance.”
Simon Martin, Principal Hardware Engineer at Raspberry Pi
The updated computer is the same size as the original. It’s ideal for owners of the original Zero, who will be able to use the same cases and accessories. But, how did the Raspberry Pi Foundation achieve this increase in performance?
In order to optimize performance in such a small package, the Raspberry Pi foundation went with a stacked package design that fit the memory module on top of the SoC.
$15
Affordable as ever.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is available to purchase now, and you can easily swap it in to work with projects currently running on an original Zero W.