I've been testing one for a couple weeks, and a quick rundown on it: it has a quad-core A53, same CPU/SoC core as the Pi 3, with 512 MB of RAM.<p>This means it can run 64-bit Pi OS, but it is memory-limited and even some of the benchmarks I ran needed extra swap space to complete. But for anything that does run in the 512 MB of LPDDR2 RAM, it is at least twice as fast as the Zero/Zero W, and sometimes 3-8x faster, depending on how things handle threading (4 cores is better than 1!).<p>My biggest concern is overheating—even at the base 1 GHz clock, it will start to throttle after a few minutes in a case with no airflow or heat sink. You can overclock to 1.2, 1.4, or even in some cases 1.5 GHz, but it starts throttling a lot more quickly unless you have really good cooling.
Original RPi0 supposedly can idle at 0.4W, where-as the 3 (whose cpu this is based on) idles at >1.5W. It's cool to have this great small package, but this is a very different offering than the first RPi0W.<p>It's felt really weird seeing so little progress in available low power ARM over the years. Atmel/Microships SAMA5D3 / SAMA5D2 with it's 600 MHz Cortex A5 (2009) still seems like- half a decade latter- one of a rare few genuinely low power Linux running SoC available for purchase/use. I'm forgetting what's available in the Cortex A7 line, which is a little higher power but which still has some very low power chips available for it, & at significantly higher performance ranges. A7 has a lot of chips you can't buy, only available in some tablets & or hard to get wearable chips, but I think there are some good offerings about too. ST has the ~$20 STM32MP1, to name one.<p>Yet I just see so much non-materialization, non-availability. It feels like the rule. 2015's Cortex A35, 2016's Cortex A32, 2019's Cortex-A34... none of these chips seem to have really materialized in any genuinely available form. There are some off-brand tablets with A35 chips but generally that's about it. The low power segment has been rather ignored.
I've been running one of these for a few months too and was excited when I saw an ARMv7 CPU. In the open source and container world, many projects have stopped supporting the Zero and RPi1 due to its lack of RAM and slow CPU speed. Even running "go build" can take multiple seconds on a simple program. Starting Node.js was also fairly slow.<p>The RPi zero shines for Python scripts that access hardware - for sensors and camera projects that are low power and cheap to make. It was actually perfect for the GrowLab project that we did over the summer with 20 others from the community <a href="https://growlab.dev" rel="nofollow">https://growlab.dev</a> - sensor data and camera images were aggregated to a more powerful RPi3/4 and then either uploaded to a static GitHub Pages site, fed into InfluxDB to create beautiful charts with Grafana.<p>The new Zero 2 means that I can start to run ARMv7 or even ARM64 containers on the zero again, but with the limit of 512GB of RAM. The launch blog post explains why this couldn't be made higher.<p>The first thing I tried out was not K3s, which I knew already suffers on a Raspberry Pi 3, but faasd. Faasd is OpenFaaS but built for pure containerd, no multi-node networking and no Kubernetes. It works fairly well for a few functions, even with NATS and Prometheus being deployed as part of the stack.<p>So whilst you're not going to be building K3s clusters with these, they can run containers - with Docker, containerd, nerdctl and even as a full application stack with faasd.<p>Where this gets more interesting for me, is hosting small applications, integrations or APIs. Perhaps with Ingress via a tunnel that can penetrate NAT/firewalls like Inlets, Argo or Ngrok.<p>I've ordered one of the release models to see how it performs. Look out for a blog post from me soon.
Surprised nobody has mentioned or compared it to the Radxa Zero.[0][1]<p>Spec of the Radxa Zero ($15):<p><pre><code> CPU: Quad Cortex-A53 1.8 GHz, 12nm process
GPU: Mali G31 MP2
RAM: LPDDR4 512MB/1GB/2GB/4GB
Storage: eMMC 5.1 8/16/32/64/128GB and uSD card
HDMI: Micro HDMI, HDMI 2.1, 4K@60 HDR
Multimedia: H265/VP9 decode 4Kx2K@60
Wireless: WiFi4/BT4 or WiFi5/BT5
USB: One USB 2.0 Type C OTG, one USB 3.0 Type C host
GPIO: 40Pin GPIO, ADC/UART/SPI/PWM
Others: Crypto Engine, support external antenna, one button
</code></pre>
Spec of the RPi Zero 2 ($15):<p><pre><code> CPU: Broadcom BCM2710A1, quad-core 64-bit SoC (Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1GHz)
RAM: 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM
Storage: None, MicroSD card slot
HDMI: Mini HDMI port
Multimedia: H.264, MPEG-4 decode (1080p30); H.264 encode (1080p30)
Wireless: 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, BLE
USB: 1 × USB 2.0 interface with OTG
GPIO: HAT-compatible 40 pin I/O header footprint
Other: OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics, CSI-2 camera connector,
composite video and reset pin solder points
</code></pre>
The Radxa seems to be better value. I'm looking for a backup device for my RPi Zero W v1.3. The Zero has been such a amazing companion for me. I use it as Wi-Fi repeater on campsites such that we can all have internet simultaneously. Over the years I added temperature sensors, light sensors and an entire cooling system for the photovoltaic system. It now keeps track of the ambient temperature in the tent and fridge and sends me an SMS if the gets too high. Endless fun.<p>[0] <a href="https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550" rel="nofollow">https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huAKEbyPcBc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huAKEbyPcBc</a>
Yay, another thing i won't be able to find anywhere for a year, then find it for $25 with "only one per customer"and $15 shipping.<p>I understand it's a global chip shortage, but when zero W came out, there wasn't one.
Pi Zeroes always looked like a scam from Canada, as the approved resellers limit you to 1 unit and shipping was more expensive than the unit. Now at 15USD, it's the first time shipping is cheaper than the unit, but I can't get it below 35CAD (28USD) shipped to Toronto.
Super exciting! We use the previous gen at my company to run octoprint software for our 3d printer farm and they do tend to run quite slow. This should be a nice needed upgrade.<p>In general the RPI Zero series is really great value for a tiny linux machine.
side rant: it's annoying how you can't buy these things by themselves, usually bundled with crap<p>I do want this, I think it's taken for granted how easy this thing can connect to a camera. I bought a Teensy/blue/BeagleBone/etc.. thinking "Oh I'll just plug in a camera into it". For the Teensy it won't but maybe the Beagle bone. I was using a single core Pi Zero so it was noticeable doing things like iterating over frames. Granted it can just be poor code on my part/noob in OpenCV.
Random thought upon reading the linked announcement:<p>If you stacked multiple Pi boards on top of each other, connected through the GPIO HAT connector, could you network them?<p>Apologies, just woke up and coffee not kicked in. This is probably silly :)<p>EDIT: yes, I should search for this sort of thing before posting: <a href="https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=127660" rel="nofollow">https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=127660</a><p>tl;dr "serial port, RS485 + SLIP of some sort, probably would max out at around 1Mbps, 4Mbps theoretically possible with small MTU's" and "There is no hardware reason why an RS485 network could not be used as the physical layer for at least 32 nodes, and with some of the RS485 driver chips, 127 nodes (they have stronger drivers)"
How long before cutting edge hardware trickles down to stuff like the Pi Zero? I think a usb-c port would be more useful for these small form-factors, but it's probably a long way of considering there's only usb 2.0.
I ordered one, then quickly cancelled because of the lack of pre-soldered header. Looking for a drop-in replacement for my Pi Zero WH due to time constraints (new baby).<p>I presume they didn't make the pre-soldered header available at launch due to high demand and the ongoing chip shortage. Much easier to produce one less complex package.<p>Despite having just 512MB RAM, I think it's perfect for the its common use cases. For me, the CPU increase will be helpful for getting it set up and installing software (especially if it needs to be compiled), not so much for when it's actually being used.
Tangential but important : supply :)<p>Here in Australia, seems like it is available from Nov 8 at Core electronics [0]<p>[0]<a href="https://core-electronics.com.au/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-wireless.html" rel="nofollow">https://core-electronics.com.au/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-wirele...</a>
Welp, excited to not be able to buy one of these.<p>One thing that's been interesting is that despite the 2x markup of anything pi related where I live, the pi pico was available almost immediately at about $6. I guess I'll be going a bit lower level then.