The Raspberry Pi 3 has significantly upgraded processing capabilities to deliver 50% more performance than Raspberry Pi 2 and approximately ten times more than the original Raspberry Pi 1, allowing it to run even higher-end applications.

The board is based on the Broadcom BCM2837 SoC, which includes an ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor running at 1.2GHz, alongside a BCM43438 combo connectivity device, which provides 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy.

The Raspberry Pi 3 boots from a micro SD card and uses the NOOBS (New Out Of the Box Software) installation manager. The standard Raspbian operating system install comes bundled with a range of productivity applications, and programming tools including Node-RED; this visual tool provides support for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services, making the board ideal for the rapid development and prototyping of IoT projects.

Retaining the same footprint as previous Raspberry Pi incarnations -- with its credit-card-sized dimensions of 85 x 56 x 17mm -- the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B retains many of the same features and capabilities of the previous generation.

These include: the extensive 40-pin GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) connector; four USB connector port; full-HD HDMI; 10/100 Ethernet; 3.5mm audio jack and composite video; camera (CSI-2) and display (DSI) interfaces; and micro-SD card slot. Power input to the board is via its micro-USB socket requiring an external, plug-in power supply unit (PSU).

The new Raspberry Pi 3 offered by RS and Allied is manufactured exclusively in the UK under licence by the distributor. A Raspberry Pi 3 Compute Module I/O Board will also be available shortly from RS and Allied, enabling OEMs to develop their own Raspberry Pi 3 based solutions for many industrial applications.