Everyone wants a slice of the Raspberry Pi; selling 700 units/second!

We recently reported about the Raspberry Pi going on sale and preorders having begun. There’s a lot of hype on the web and demand is clearly increasing. According to a story by The Guardian, 700 units of the Raspberry Pi are being sold every second - that’s a staggering number of devices.The official site - www.raspberrypi.org has seen a lot of traffic over the past month and is currently, partially down. Servers are being relocated to a new location, so the site is temporarily down. The Raspberry Pi has gained popularity because of its simple design and affordable pricing of just - $35 (roughly Rs.1,800 if converted to Indian Rupees).

High demand!

The Raspberry Pi is incredibly compact and bundles a whole bunch of features. It’s powered by an ARM processor on a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC. It’s a 700MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM and the Video 4 GPU allows the device to handle full HD video playback and even 40Mbps Blu-ray streams with ease. One of the two models has an Ethernet port and two USB ports, which means you can connect external drives and get it on the web. It also has OpenGL support and is capable of some 3D rendering as well. There’s also space for some overclocking.

All in all, the device is pretty versatile and there are demos showing the device playing the popular media centre software XBMC on it. There are also Linux variants being developed for the platform, so there’s a lot of potential for the device. There’s a way to get it to India as well - a site called Element14 will sell it to you for Rs.2,350, including the shipping. There’s no clear date on when the products will be shipped, but products are said to be shipped in March and April. Newer customers will receive their shipments in May or June, it’s estimated.