The new Raspberry Pi 3 has been beefed up from the previous version. Now it comes with a Broadcom BCM2837, which is an ARM v8 quad-core Cortex-A53, clocked at 1.2GHz. I have also seen somewhere a recommendation for using a 2.5A power supply.
Does this imply an increased thermal output, hence increased cooling requirements?
This would have further implications in the cases that can be used for housing it.
More information on this will be available as and when the units start arriving with purchasers and we get a clearer picture of overclocking capabilities and such. To the best of my knowledge the figures from the benchmarking done by the pimoroni.com blog are accurate:
In terms of CPU temperature, the Raspberry Pi 3 runs significantly hotter than the Pi 2. We used the following to measure peak CPU temperature while primes were being computed.
while true; do cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp; sleep 1; doneAll three Pis idle at 36-38 degrees, and the Pi 3 gets up to a toasty 75 degrees while computing primes on four cores, compared with 52 degrees for the Pi 2 and 46 degrees on the Pi Zeros single core.
It's worth noting that these temperatures won't cause you any problems. The Raspberry Pi 3 will automatically throttle performance if the internal temperature of the SoC reaches around 82 degrees centigrade.
With these figures in mind I'd say you might, if you were planning on throwing a lot of hard number crunching at your Pi, need some kind of cooling to prevent thermal throttling. Under normal conditions I don't think it would be anything to worry about.
