The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools.The Raspberry Pi is manufactured in four board configurations through licensed manufacturing agreements with Newark element14 (Premier Farnell), RS Components and Egoman. These companies sell the Raspberry Pi online. Egoman produces a version for distribution solely in China and Taiwan, which can be distinguished from other Pis by their red coloring and lack of FCC/CE marks. The hardware is the same across all manufacturers.
In 2014, the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the Compute Module, which packages a Raspberry Pi Model B into module for use as a part of embedded systems, to encourage their use.
The Raspberry Pi is based on the Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC) which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU(Graphics processing unit), and was originally shipped with 256 megabytes of RAM, later upgraded (Model B & Model B+) to 512 MB. The system has Secure Digital (SD) or MicroSD (Model A+ and B+) sockets for boot media and persistent storage.
The Foundation provides Debian and Arch Linux ARM distributions for download. Tools are available for Python as the main programming language, with support for BBC BASIC (via the RISC OS image or the Brandy Basic clone for Linux), C, C++, Java, Perl and Ruby
