Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W vs Raspberry Pi Zero W: What Upgrades Does It Bring?
Oct. 30, 2021Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W vs Raspberry Pi Zero W: In-depth Comparison
We have compared these Raspberry Pi Zero boards on the basis of design, CPU, ports and connectivity, as well as price in this article. So without further ado, let’s dive right in.
Starting with the design, the engineers at Raspberry Pi Foundation managed to pack all the hardware improvements to the original Zero’s form factor. As a result,you can use almost all cases and accessories designed for Zero W with the Zero 2 W. In case you are wondering, the exact dimensions for both models are 30mm x 65mm x 13mm.
While the form factor and dimension remain the same, the Zero 2 W is heftier than the Zero W. How, you ask? The organization explains that the“Zero 2 W uses thick internal copper layers to conduct heat away from the processor.”So yeah, you can now run much heavier workloads on this new Zero-series board, thanks to higher sustained performance.
With the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, Raspberry Pi Foundation has bridged the performance gap by using aslightly underclocked 1GHz version of Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoCseen on the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3. It is a quad-core 64-bit SoC with ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1GHz frequency. The SoC and 512MB 450MHz LPDDR2 SDRAM are integrated as a system-in-package (SiP, which they call RP3A0 RP3A0. To recall, the Pi Zero W features a single-core 32-bit ARM11 Broadcom BCM 2835 SoC at 1GHz.
According to the sysbench results cited by the foundation,Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W offers almost five times the performance for multi-threaded workloads than its predecessor. That’s a significant jump and will help you boot up and get started with your RPi Zero projects faster.
The ports selection and connectivity remain mostly unchanged in this upgrade. You get the usual HAT-compatible 40 pin I/O header, USB 2.0 with OTG, microSD card slot, mini HDMI port, composite video, CSI-2 Camera connector on RPi Zero 2 W.
Multimedia options include H.264, MPEG-4 decode (1080p/30), H.264 encoding at 1080p @ 30fps and support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics. It’s worth noting that the Zero 2 W uses Bluetooth 4.2 as opposed to Bluetooth 4.1 on the predecessor.
Since Raspberry Pi Foundation isn’t discontinuing the Zero W, you have the option to pick between the Zero W and Zero 2 W to fuel your cool DIY projects. The performance improvements, courtesy of the quad-core processor,justify the $5 price jump on the new Zero 2 Wboard if you ask me. It should deliver a better experience and won’t hinder your workflow. If you are looking for project inspirations, feel free to look at our article on thebest Raspberry Pi Zero projects.
Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.
