*Taps monitor* – is this thing on?

Well, that was a busy couple of days. Thanks for bearing with us while we tried to stop this website from falling over under the weight of more than one million more requests than it usually sees. (I hope we’ll have some graphs and pictures of servers weeping blood for you later on.) One of the things we had to do to try to keep things working round here was to shut the forums for a couple of days: we’re sorry you couldn’t get your fix, and you’ll be pleased to hear they’re back up now. In case you’ve been living under a stone for the last few days, I guess we should explain that the reason for this sudden loss of functionality was the release of our newest product, Raspberry Pi 2 – which has a new quadcore ARMv7 chip, 1GB of RAM and no wheels, all for the very familiar price of $35. Here are some videos to let you know what it’s all about. First up, here’s the footage that was taken live at the press conference where we announced Pi 2. Eben stands up to talk about two minutes in. A couple of boards had sneaked out into the hands of community bloggers: Alex Eames from Raspi.TV did an introductory video – and he also made the video below, where he hammers all four cores in parallel to see how the Pi 2 copes. (Splendidly, is the answer.) You can download the test he used to try it out on your own Pi 2. Make magazine also did a very jolly performance test, which should help illustrate to B and B+ owners just how much more oomph the Pi 2 has. Here’s Eben on the BBC: A certain snarky somebody shouted “Wheels!” at the press conference when one of the journalists asked what improvements we should have made to the device. Adafruit came out our rescue within hours. There’s been so much press we can’t possibly link to it all – thanks very much to everybody who took the time to write about the release. All the existing stock of Pi 2 (around 150,000) had gone by Tuesday, but we’re making new ones at a rate of 20,000 a day, so if you have one on order it should be with you soon. (Some resellers may still have stock – we don’t have figures on all of them, so shop around.) We’ve been overwhelmed at the reception you guys gave the news; thank you for your support, your enthusiasm and your excitement. We couldn’t do this stuff without you.

URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/taps-monitor-is-this-thing-on/