If you're on the waiting list for a Raspberry Pi—the $35 Linux computer based on the ARM system-on-a-chip architecture—there's a silver lining to being in the backlog. Starting today, the Model B Raspberry Pi will ship with 512 megabytes of RAM—double its original memory for the same price.
Foundation founder and trustee Eben Upton announced the upgrade on the Raspberry Pi blog today. He said there had been many requests from the community for a more expensive "Model C" Raspberry Pi. "This would be useful for people who want to use the Pi as a general-purpose computer, with multiple large applications running concurrently," he wrote. "[It] would enable some interesting embedded use cases (particularly using Java) which are slightly too heavyweight to fit comfortably in 256MB."
But rather the foundation wanted to stay within the Raspberry Pi's $35 price point. The organization worked with manufacturers RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell as well as the suppliers of the Pi's components to upgrade the existing Model B to 512 MB of RAM—ultimately preserving the $35 tag. All pending orders for the Model B are being filled with the upgrade.
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