The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, offering a faster CPU and faster wireless throughput than its predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ comes exactly two years after the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and is in line with Raspberry Pi Foundation’s two-year B+ ‘evolution’ upgrade.
In other words, the changes don’t warrant calling it a Raspberry Pi 4, but there are noticeable improvements, including a faster processor, higher Wi-Fi speeds, and faster Ethernet.
The Pi 3 Model B+ has a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core Broadcom Arm Cortex A53-architecture processor compared with the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B’s 1.2GHz CPU. It doesn’t seem like much of a change but it does amount to a 15 percent performance improvement.
It also supports dual-band wireless local-area networks at 2.4GHz and 5GHz, Bluetooth 4.2, and Bluetooth Low Energy.
Raspberry Pi Foundation says the dual-band wireless LAN comes with modular compliance certification, which should make it easier and cheaper to commercially launch products based on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. This move should help cut down on wireless LAN compliance testing.
Otherwise, physically it’s identical to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Raspberry Pi 2, featuring four USB 2.0 ports, a 40-pin GPIO header, one full-size HDMI port, display and camera ports, and four-pole stereo output and composite video ports.
