I’ve been following the development of the Raspberry Pi pretty much since it was announced, and since then I have thought of numerous uses for a tiny, low powered, yet powerful and cheap (£16* without ethernet, £22* with) device.

My main reason is to run one as a media box plugged into my TV via the Raspberry Pi’s HDMI port, and last week the XBMC team released a video of their software running on a Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is capable of decoding 1080p video and with it’s HDMI port make it a perfect media streamer.

The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries.

Raspberry Pi’s should hopefully start shipping late Janusry, early Februrary 2012, and I cannot wait!

* Prices are an estimate based on current conversion rates.