This must be the ultimate in well-kept secrets.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has today announced the launch of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. Aimed at commerce/industry, rather than education or hobbyists, the Compute aims to give users the Raspberry Pi package of memory and main processor in a smaller form factor that can be embedded into systems rather than used standalone. Instead of an SD card, the operating system can be flashed to a 4GB eMMC that is embedded on the board.
They have also announced the (open source) Compute Module I/O Board which contains the DDR2 SODIMM socket to house the Compute module and breaks out all the pins to handy headers and ribbon cable slots. It also exposes the HDMI socket and single USB port.
What this means for hobbyists I don’t know. Clearly hobbyists will buy them, because we’re geeks and we love new tech, but I doubt it will replace the Pi in the short-medium term. For industry, there are clear benefits – form factor is small but the power of the platform is still available. What will also be interesting to see is how much of a side-industry is created for the board – more cases, I/O boards are obviously all on the cards. For existing Pi owners, it doesn’t mean anything very much as the two can’t be used together (at least not in an obvious way like the CSI camera or DSI screen) but for hobbyists it could open up a new world in experimentation with more I/O pins to latch onto.
In terms of getting hold of the new board(s), RS and Element 14 are expecting them in stock in June. They will initially be sold in batches of 100 at $30 each but I expect this will soon drift outwards to individual resellers sometime soon after at a higher price.