Introduction

The chip at the heart of the original Raspberry Pi (a Broadcom BCM2835 processor) was originally designed to be a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) for mobile and embedded applications. The ARM core that drives most of the Raspberry Pi's functionality was added because some extra space was available on the chip; this enabled this powerful GPU to be used as a System-On-Chip (SoC) solution.

As you can imagine, if that original ARM core (ARM1176JZF-S, which is the ARMv6 architecture) consisted of only a small part of the chip on the Raspberry Pi, you would be right in thinking that the GPU must perform rather well.

Note

The processor at the heart of the Raspberry Pi 3 has been upgraded (to a Broadcom BCM2837 processor); it now contains four ARM cores (Cortex A53 ARMv8A), each of which are more powerful than the original ARMv6. Coupled with the same GPU from the previous generation, the Raspberry Pi 3 is far better equipped to perform the calculations required to build 3D environments...