The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. Its a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

You can buy the Raspberry Pi through [URL="http://www.farnell.com/"]Premier Farnell/Element 14[/URL] and [URL="http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=raspberrypi"]RS Components[/URL]. Both distributors sell all over the world.

You will get the Raspberry Pi Board itself. A power supply or SD cards are not included but can be purchased at the same time from Farnell and RS. You will be able to buy preloaded SD cards too.

Model A has 256MB RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet (network connection). Model B has 512MB RAM, 2 USB port and an Ethernet port.

The Raspberry Pi measures 85.60mm x 56mm x 21mm, with a little overlap for the SD card and connectors which project over the edges. It weighs 45g.

The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries.

The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode.

The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.

That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.