The Raspberry Pi SoC (System on Chip) is a Broadcom BCM2835.
The ARM
This contains an ARM1176JZFS (ARM11), with floating point, running at 700Mhz (over clocking to 800MHz is often OK if needed).
Software needs to be compiled for ARMv6 to be used with the Raspberry Pi.
The GPU
Videocore 4 GPU.
Capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s.
Fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries.
Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode.
Capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.
So, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance.
Datasheets etc
http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/BCM2835-ARM-Peripherals.pdf
http://elinux.org/BCM2835_datasheet_errata
2 years ago
9 year old post, but just to update, the link is working today.
11 years ago
http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2835.md is dead link!
12 years ago
Nice compilation of RPi video components. Thanks.