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Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

ARMv6 still? I don't see how that's necessary to save on the BOM. I hope legacy code was not the deciding factor here.

According to [1], these will be ARMv7 architecture Cortex-A7 cores. Looks like we'll know for sure only when the foundation announces a public release.

[1]: http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/02/02/raspberry-pi-2-model-...

A7 is also confirmed by one of XBMC devs

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=217040&pid=1911780#p...

Linked article on the Register has been updated to confirm ARMv7/NEON http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=v0LVywBi

I haven't been able to find what CPU core is used in the new chip. 3x sunspider performance is over the BCM2835 is claimed, which is not with the higher clocked ARM11 cores. They also reference limitations of the ARM11 core being gone. However, elsewhere in the article they still say it is an ARM11 core.

nope, it's an arm 7, not an arm 6. https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-2-mo...

I was disappointed about that too.

Backward compatibility is a smart move sometimes. All the users can swap their design with the rpi2 in place. A nice feature. I'm all for newer ARM ISA, but I can understand (after some HNer explanation) v6 can be desirable.

AFAIK ARM ISAs are almost completely backwards-compatible so ARMv6 code should be fine on ARMv7; however, there does appear to be a few caveats: https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/ARMv7%20c...

Yeah, someone on reddit just told me that, I had no idea. Question's still open.

Is that really important for most buyers though?

It could be. ARMv7 means Android may finally get ported to the Pi.

That was pretty much my feel as well. So much for "now the CPU's fast"... yeah nope.

I thought the issue was mostly about lack of support?

meh, it'd be nice if it was more open from the CPU point of view but it kinda works out, plus "there's always hope". Can't make up for the lack of instructions and power.

Heck, both of them reasons while I like intel chips afterall. Their newest ones are pretty sexy too. I'm hoping sexy boards of similar form factor, and... oh yeah price.. err. yeah not going to happen :(

So in the meantime armv7+ boards are pretty decent (with similar random support, which, also mostly works out)

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