Raspberry Pi smashes two million milestone

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced another sales milestone, having seen two million of its low-cost microcomputers reach end-users since it launched last year.

Originally designed as a tool for education and with a proposed initial production run of just 2,000, the Raspberry Pi has proven an unalloyed success. Despite an outdated ARMv6-based system-on-chip processor, limited memory and non-standard USB ports, the device's low cost, accessibility, and built-in general-purpose input-output (GPIO) capabilities have found it a home at the heart of any number of projects and hacks.

The non-profit Foundation reported its millionth sale almost exactly a year after the device launched, a rate no other development board has come close to matching. Now, the Foundation has doubled that figure - well ahead of its projected February 2014 timescale.

'It was a bit of a shock at the end of last week when we got the latest sales figures and discovered that the 2,000,000th Raspberry Pi was sold in the last week of October,' wrote the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Liz Upton. 'We never thought we’d be where we are today when we started this journey: it’s down to you, our amazing community, and we’re very, very lucky to have you. Thanks!'

Since its launch, the Foundation has made relatively minor changes to the board. Its memory has been doubled from 256MB to 512MB, along with board design changes to resolve flaws in the original models - including problems with how the USB ports interact with anything more high-drain than a keyboard or mouse. The Foundation has also launched the Model A, a cost-reduced variant which has 256MB of memory, a single USB port and no networking in order to lower the price from around £28 to just £20.