The ins and outs of the Raspberry Pi

At the heart of the Pi is the Broadcom System on a Chip (SOC)—think of it as all the common hardware components of a PC baked into a small piece of silicon. Different versions of the Pi have different types of Broadcom chip, as outlined in the model comparison table above, but they are each based on an ARM processor, with the Pi Model 3 having the most powerful ARM processor.

For graphics, the Pi sports a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU, which is quite powerful for such a tiny device and is capable of full HD video playback through the HDMI connector built in to every Pi.

The following figure shows the Raspberry Pi Version 3 board layout and connectors:

Raspberry Pi Version 3 layout taken from the RS Components product ...

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