New £4 Raspberry Pi Zero is 40% faster than original

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has unveiled the smallest version of its popular microcomputer today, which is available now for just £4.

Manufactured in Wales, the Raspberry Pi is 65mm wide, 30mm high and 5mm thick – less than half the size of a $5 note – but will reportedly run faster than the original model.

According to the full spec list, the device has a Broadcom BCM2835 application processor with a 1GHz ARM11 core – 40 per cent faster than that of the Raspberry Pi.

The Zero also features:

• 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM
• A micro-SD card slot
• A mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output
• Micro-USB sockets for data and power
• An unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header
• An unpopulated composite video header

To celebrate the release, The Raspberry Pi Foundation has included a free Zero with every copy of its magazine The MagPi.

Designed to make computer programming accessible to everyone, the original Raspberry Pi was launched in 2012. Last year it was named as the world’s best game-making tech by the judging panel of the Develop 100 Tech list.

You can find out more about the history of Raspberry Pi in our interview here.