Today there's a new model on sale, the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, offering a host of performance improvements over the Model B+ edition released last year. The price remains the same though, at US$35.

The new Pi uses the same PCB layout and footprint as its predecessor, so if you own a Model B+ then you'll have no problem finding your way around the updated board. The big change is in the speed with which the device can crunch through numbers and tasks, its makers say it runs up to six times faster (depending on the job at hand). The Pi 2 Model B uses a quad-core Broadcom BCM2836 ARMv7 processor running at 900 MHz, a significant improvement on the single-core, 700 MHz CPUs of the older boards.

There's twice as much RAM here, 1 GB rather than 512 MB, and the memory is clocked at a faster speed too.