240 THE OFFICIAL RASPBERRY PI BEGINNER'S GUIDE
T
he various components and features of a computer are known as its specifications, and a
look at the specifications gives you the information you need to compare two computers.
These specifications can seem confusing at first, are highly technical, and you don’t need
to know them to use the Raspberry Pi, but they are included here for the curious reader.
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ system-on-chip is a Broadcom BCM2837B0, which you’ll see
written on its metal lid if you look closely enough. This features four 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53
central processing unit cores, each running at 1.4GHz (1.4 thousand million cycles per
second), and a Broadcom VideoCore IV graphics processing unit running at 400MHz (400
million cycles per second) for video tasks and 300MHz (300 million cycles per second) for 3D
rendering tasks like games.
The system-on-chip is connected to 1GB (one thousand million bytes) of LPDDR2 (Low-
Power Double-Data-Rate 2) RAM (random-access memory), which runs at 900MHz (900
million cycles per second). This memory is shared between the central processor and the
graphics processor. The microSD card slot supports up to 512GB (512 thousand million bytes)
of storage.
The Ethernet port supports gigabit (1000Mbps, 1000-Base-T) connections, while the
radio supports 802.11ac WiFi networks running on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands,
Bluetooth 4.2, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connections.Raspberry Pi
specifications
Appendix F