What is Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi is a very low cost credit card sized single-board computer originally designed to teach people to program. But quickly after it launched back in 2012, tinkerers, makers and electronics enthusiasts quickly adopted it because of the small footprint and accessible price.
The raspberry pi runs on various Linux distributions that can be installed on to an SD card. (see table below for more information)
The low price and the huge community around the RPi are what differentiates it from numerous other small computing devices.
What's new about the Raspberry Pi 3?
The third generation of Raspberry Pi comes with a 64-bit quad core ARM cortex-A53 CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz which will give you a lot more processing power. According to benchmarks by the Raspberry Pi Foundation the CPU of the third generation Raspberry Pi offers 10 times more performance over the first generation and a 50% increase over the second one.
Also new is the 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1 on the board itself. This means you will no longer need to buy an extra WiFi/Bluetooth dongle and it will be a lot easier when it comes to setting up the WiFi and Bluetooth.