Raspberry Pi ‘should achieve double iPhone 4S performance’

A personal computer built to be no bigger than a credit card is said will “double iPhone 4S performance across a range of content".

Eben Upton, the executive director of the Raspberry Pi project, claimed the $25 micro computer boasts an industry-leading GPU.

"I was on the team that designed the graphics core, so I’m a little biased here, but I genuinely believe we have the best mobile GPU team in the world at Broadcom in Cambridge," Upton said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.

The vision behind the Raspberry Pi project is to reignite interest in personal computer programing at a young age.

With its relatively low price, HDMI output and mobile form factor, Upton believes his team has built a device that can inspire young people to start coding for themselves.

The wider issue is that games programming is a discipline relatively isolated away from young people. Computers like the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum had created programming craze among young students in the ‘80s – Upton believes the Pi could spark such a trend again.

"The games industry has an enormous part to play in solving this problem,” he added.

“We’d like to see games companies chip-in with tutorials, free asset packs, internships, coding competitions with decent-sized prizes.”

"One of the challenges facing kids today is that AAA content is so far beyond what they can reasonably hope to achieve, so casual games provide a nice target; this is why we’re concentrating on working with companies like YoYo Games to give kids the tools they need to write the next Angry Birds rather than the next Modern Warfare."