On the original Raspberry Pi’s forth birthday the Raspberry Pi Foundation released the lasted version of the Raspberry Pi – the Raspberry Pi 3. The new Raspberry Pi 3 is a power house with an upgraded CPU, more connectivity and full backwards compatibility with the Raspberry Pi 1 and 2.
The main upgrade is the new processor called BCM2837. The new processor chips is a 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU – which will give you an possible 10x improvement over the Raspberry Pi 1, although typical results will be around 2.5x performance for single threaded applications. Note that in addition to the increase in clock speed the new processor also includes an improved instruction set and is now 64 bits.
Another huge improvement is additionally connectivity. The new Raspberry Pi now includes build in WiFi and Bluetooth which will certainly help free up the some USB ports that was often previously used for USB adapters. The Raspberry Pi 3 has 4 USB ports like the Raspberry Pi 2 and the Model B+ of the first generation.
You can buy the Raspberry Pi 3 here if you want the stand alone computer board – or buy it as part of starter kit here including power supply, SD card, and case. There is also the ultimate starter kit available here that in addition to SD card, power supply and case also includes GPIO to Breadboard Interface Board and various electronics components perfect for a hardware oriented project.
The Raspberry Pi 3 comes in the same form factor as the previous generation making it a drop in replacement.