5 ms·
It is nearly impossible to buy Broadcom chips in small quantities (or even buy them if you are not a large company).
by wolfgke 10y ago
It is nearly impossible to buy Broadcom chips in small quantities (or even buy them if you are not a large company).
- viewer5 10y ago> or even buy them if you are not a large company Because of the cost? Or do they refuse to deal with small companies?
- xienze 10y agoThey normally deal in massive quantities. Asking for a couple thousand units just isn't worth the effort. That's what makes the RPi Foundation unique -- Broadcom _does_ deal in small quantities for them in support of the mission.
- wolfgke 10y ago> Broadcom _does_ deal in small quantities for them in support of the mission. Rather: originally in support of the mission. :-)
- 0xcde4c3db 10y agoThe latter. Their chips aren't sold through distributors, and they'll pretty much only give the time of day to high-volume OEMs. They stonewall companies that are big enough to get in-person visits from sales engineers from other major vendors (TI, Freescale, Xilinx). Raspberry Pi cofounder Eben Upton was a technical director at Broadcom, so he had inside connections.
- cillian64 10y agoLook into the Next Thing Co GR8 -- it's a vaguely similar SOC (the thing in the Chip Pro) but is (in theory - I haven't investigated) available in small quantities and with an accessible datasheet.
- wolfgke 10y agoThe Next Thing Co GR8 is clearly not made by Broadcom. Look at the bottom of > https://getchip.com/pages/chippro https://getchip.com/pages/chippro who comes in question as manufacturer of the SoC (hint: Broadcom is not among them). Also according to > https://github.com/NextThingCo/CHIP_Pro-Hardware/blob/master/Datasheets/GR8_Datasheet_v1.0.pdf https://github.com/NextThingCo/CHIP_Pro-Hardware/blob/master... it uses a Mali400 GPU (not a VideoCore IV as the RPi).