A British outfit which are building a low-cost Linux computer with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU for between $25 and $35 claim that the beast knocks the socks off Nvidia's Tegra 2.

The Rasberry Pi, which is the size of a deck of cards is based around the Broadcom BCM2835 chipset, which is designed to handle intensive multimedia. Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton claimed that the Broadcom graphics hardware in the Raspberry Pi offers twice the performance of the iPhone 4S GPU and soundly beats NVIDIA's Tegra 2.

Already a team of XBMC developers have ported the media center to the Raspberry Pi using a developer hardware unit supplied by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It was able to smoothly play an H.264-encoded 1080p video. The cut price machine is designed to encourage people to learn how to tinker with hardware in the same way they used to with the likes of the Spectrum during the 1980s.

It is starting to look jolly good which means that you will be able to build your own media centre mini-pc at a sod all cost. [Just in time for media centers to be rendered obsolete by smart TVs. Ed]