That's not to say, however, that all video will playback this smoothly, with performance dependent on the source video, the player used and bitrate. Unlike its predecessor, the new board is capable of playing 1080p MP4 video at 60 frames per second (with a bitrate of about 5400Kbps), boosting the Pi's media center credentials. Compared to the original Pi, real-world applications will see a performance increase of between 2.5x-for single-threaded applications-and more than 20x-when video playback is accelerated by the chip's NEON engine. For those interested in benchmarks, the Pi 3's CPU-the board's main processor-has roughly 50-60 percent better performance in 32-bit mode than that of the Pi 2, and is 10x faster than the original single-core Raspberry Pi (based on a multi-threaded CPU benchmark in SysBench).

The quad-core Raspberry Pi 3 is both faster and more capable than its predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 2. How is the Raspberry Pi 3 different from its predecessors?