The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming. ...

We were hoping to have the Raspberry Pi available to order by the end of 2011. We still expect to be auctioning some of our first batch of beta boards before the end of the year (keep an eye on the site after Christmas); we’ll be moving to main production in January....

The Model A will cost $25 and the Model B $35.

So what is it -- the innards of a mobile phone minus the radios?

Cool project.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has begun manufacture of its $35 ARM GNU/Linux machine in Taiwan and China, a move which it says it was driven to by prohibitive UK tax legislation.

Initially, the group had planned to manufacture the device in the UK, boosting employment and industry. However, because of multiple issues encountered with domestic manufacture, the Foundation was forced to look elsewhere.

UK companies also quoted a completion time of around 13 weeks for the machine, around four times that offered by Asian plants, whilst costs for the device would have been pushed up unacceptably for the charity.

Even at the cheapest quoted cost, which would have meant a severely restricted production run, UK manufacture would have cut an extra $5 from the margin on each machine.

However, the biggest barrier to domestic production, says the charity, was UK tax law. Because UK law requires companies to pay import tax on electrical components, and not finished devices, importing parts for local building would add yet further cost.

By constructing the machine abroad and importing it whole, the charity has saved itself significant cash, highlighting a situation which it says it harming domestic industry considerably. . . .

Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax," reads a post on the foundation's blog.

"If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK - with all of those components soldered onto it - it does not attract any import duty at all.

"This means that it's really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it's one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It's an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things ...

Raspberry Pi executive director Eben Upton claims that the graphics core of the $25 credit card sized computer "should double iPhone 4S performance across a range of content".

Speaking to Digital Foundry in an interview published today about how the Broadcom GPU compares to the current state-of-the-art in the mobile sector, Upton enthused about the level of graphical power available to homebrew programmers with the device.

"I was on the team that designed the graphics core, so I'm a little biased here, but I genuinely believe we have the best mobile GPU team in the world at Broadcom in Cambridge," Upton said.

"What's really striking is how badly Tegra 2 performs relative even to simple APs using licensed Imagination Technologies (TI and Apple) or ARM Mali (Samsung) graphics. To summarise, BCM2835 has a tile mode architecture - so it kills immediate-mode devices like Tegra on fill-rate - and we've chosen to configure it with a very large amount of shader performance, so it does very well on compute-intensive benchmarks, and should double iPhone 4S performance across a range of content."

Upton believes that the size, scale and scope of AAA development has put games programming out of reach for many enthusiasts and hopes that the rise of mobile gaming and the availability of a cheap, accessible platform could make all the difference.

After the Raspberry Pi’s pre-order launch through two resellers caused temporary website crashes, VentureBeat caught up with Eben Upton, Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. He is thrilled that “demand has been absolutely enormous.”

The Pi is available internationally through outlets Premier Farnell and RS Components. There are no plans to increase the number of distributors for the foreseeable future as “these companies are in a position to build a very large number of devices,” adds Upton. He believes that the backlog of “many, many tens of thousands” orders will be addressed by late April.

That’s a lot of excitement for a new hardware platform from a non-profit organization. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity that wants to foster programming skills among students and promote the study of computer science.

Eben Upton clarifies: “Remember that our priority goal isn’t to build computers. Our priority goal is to encourage people to learn to program. Building computers is like a side effect. We have to do it because we don’t believe there’s a good platform for teaching available. It’s a necessary step — and a good source of money to help us to achieve that goal.”

Upton assures us that North Americans ordering a Raspberry Pi don’t have to feel bad about taking something away from British school children. “To be honest, I think our first orders will mostly go to middle-aged guys, because these are the people who already know about computers and are in a position to make use of what is currently a very bare-bones platform.” Upton is counting on “the hackers” to support the new platform with software that will help the Pi become a good classroom product.

Both Raspberry Pi models are equipped with 256MB RAM, an 700MHz ARM processor and a VideoCore IV GPU capable of Blu-ray quality (1080p) video playback. The hardware architecture is not too different from smartphones, which should help software developers: “It has a lot of graphical performance. It is a really good platform to port iOS or Android apps onto,” says Upton. “We already have some early developers out there who have taken apps from a mobile device [to the Raspberry Pi], and found it performs very well.” So does the Foundation have any plans for an app platform? “That’s an interesting question. I think we would like to do something in that area, but we haven’t had a chance to do it.”

Regarding additions to the product portfolio, Upton responded, “I have no comment about future products. Read into that what you will”. And even if the Raspberry grows into a big computer brand, he doesn’t envision the charity turning into a regular corporation