The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released another single-board computer (SBC), having recently brought Vulkan 1.1 support to the Pi 4, Pi 400 and Compute Module 4. This time, the Foundation has turned its attention to the Pi Zero series, last updated in 2018 with the Pi Zero WH.
The Foundation's latest SBC is the Pi Zero 2 W, which it has built around a BRP3A0 chip that relies on a Broadcom BCM2710A SoC. The BCM2710A contains four ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at 1 GHz and has 512 MB of DDR2 SDRAM at its disposal. According to the Foundation, the Pi Zero 2 W offers approximately 5x the performance of the original Pi Zero in single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads.
The Pi Zero 2 W measures 65 x 30 x 13 mm and contains the same I/O as its predecessor. Hence, the SBC has a 40-pin GPIO header, a mini HDMI port, a micro USB 2.0 OTG port, a micro SD card reader and a MIPI CSI-2 camera connector. Almost all Pi Zero accessories should be compatible with the Pi Zero 2 W, too. The Foundation has made no upgrades to Wi-Fi connectivity, which remains at WiFi 4. However, the new Pi Zero supports Bluetooth 4.2, up from Bluetooth 4.1.
The Pi Zero 2 W is orderable now for US$15, although it is also available in other markets like the EU, UK and Hong Kong. The Foundation will ship 200,000 units this year and 250,000 in 1H 2022.