"If you have an outstanding order with either distributor, you will receive the upgraded device in place of the 256MB version you ordered," said Eben Upton, the creator of the tiny computer, in his recent blog post. ""Units should start arriving in customers' hands today, and we will be making a firmware upgrade available in the next couple of days to enable access to the additional memory."

That means people who buy a Raspberry Pi will now get 512MB of RAM as standard, twice as much as before, although they will pay $35 instead of $25. The upgrade to the Model B version of the Raspberry Pi kicks in today at distributors Element 14/Premier Farnell and RS Components.

Raspberry Pi now comes with 512MB of RAM

 The reason behind this change is that the most common suggestion from fans of Raspberry Pi is the Raspberry Pi Foundation should make a more-expensive 'Model C' version of the £25 device with more RAM. " This would be useful for people who want to use the Pi as a general-purpose computer, with multiple large applications running concurrently, and would enable some interesting embedded use cases (particularly using Java) which are slightly too heavyweight to fit comfortably in 256MB.", according to Eben Upton in the blog post.

The Raspberry Pi was developed as a cheap device for kids to learn programming on, and it was designed to keep manufacturing down — for example, it initially did not come with MPEG-2 support for this reason. One other untrumpeted shift in the Model Bs now being shipped is that they come with a Samsung chip, rather than the Hynix product seen earlier.

Read more about this on the official blog of Raspberry Pi.