4 ms·

You misunderstand the point of a company like broadcom. The Pi is a rounding error money wise.

salawat 6y ago
Can you go into a bit more detail on this? I mean, I get that they supply parts for specialized devices, but why would a company pass up on the opportunity to reap as much goodwill and brand recognition as the position of "the people that made the Raspberry Pi economical" could engender? I mean think about it for a minute. This is this generations 486 or Commodore or VIC-20. I scratch my head at trying to imagine the thought process of those in management to completely throw away this opportunity unless they really have something big to hide.
- atonse 6y ago
  It’s because it’s not an opportunity. When you are going after selling millions or tens of millions of units every year in cell phones, these chips at this point are old for them. A lot of tech in this chip was probably in a cell phone 5-7 years ago. So they’ve made their profits from it. Having it out in a few hundred thousand RPis won’t make much of a difference at this point.
  - barkingcat 6y ago
    That said, it is a good way to clear out their warehouse inventory I guess.
  - justin66 6y ago
    > Having it out in a few hundred thousand RPis won’t make much of a difference at this point. Many millions of Raspberry Pis are sold in a year. They aren't Broadcom's highest priority but the foundation is a legitimate customer now.
- lozaning 6y ago
  Lets say that they start playing nice and fully support the rpi project. How would you as a consumer show your increased support for broadcom? Go out and buy a bunch of products that contain specifically broadcom chips? A bulk order of modems off Digikey?
  - spacemanmatt 6y ago
    I think one should feel compelled to go picket competing silicon vendors. I'm not really sure how/where that is even possible.
- barkingcat 6y ago
  I think one aspect of the discussion is that the Raspberry Pi does not represent a sample of the engineering that Broadcom customers work with. It's way too high level. Broadcom would be glad to sponsor something like Verilog/VLSI engineering tools. Maybe like an FPGA board that implements certain Broadcom proprietary instruction sets and lets people use that as an onboarding ramp to get them inducted in a "first hit's free" kinda way. Broadcom customers buy chips in order to build other electronic products. Not to learn or program python or even C/C++. The original intent of the Rpi as an embedded controller is closer to what Broadcom wanted to do, and likely was how RPi talked them into agreeing with the whole thing in the first place. That market position has been taken over by the arduino family though, so the positioning of Rpi within the Broadcom general strategy isn't well matched.

Can you go into a bit more detail on this? I mean, I get that they supply parts for specialized devices, but why would a company pass up on the opportunity to reap as much goodwill and brand recognition as the position of "the people that made the Raspberry Pi economical" could engender? I mean think about it for a minute. This is this generations 486 or Commodore or VIC-20. I scratch my head at trying to imagine the thought process of those in management to completely throw away this opportunity unless they really have something big to hide.

atonse 6y ago
It’s because it’s not an opportunity. When you are going after selling millions or tens of millions of units every year in cell phones, these chips at this point are old for them. A lot of tech in this chip was probably in a cell phone 5-7 years ago. So they’ve made their profits from it. Having it out in a few hundred thousand RPis won’t make much of a difference at this point.
- barkingcat 6y ago
  That said, it is a good way to clear out their warehouse inventory I guess.
- justin66 6y ago
  > Having it out in a few hundred thousand RPis won’t make much of a difference at this point. Many millions of Raspberry Pis are sold in a year. They aren't Broadcom's highest priority but the foundation is a legitimate customer now.
lozaning 6y ago
Lets say that they start playing nice and fully support the rpi project. How would you as a consumer show your increased support for broadcom? Go out and buy a bunch of products that contain specifically broadcom chips? A bulk order of modems off Digikey?
- spacemanmatt 6y ago
  I think one should feel compelled to go picket competing silicon vendors. I'm not really sure how/where that is even possible.
barkingcat 6y ago
I think one aspect of the discussion is that the Raspberry Pi does not represent a sample of the engineering that Broadcom customers work with. It's way too high level. Broadcom would be glad to sponsor something like Verilog/VLSI engineering tools. Maybe like an FPGA board that implements certain Broadcom proprietary instruction sets and lets people use that as an onboarding ramp to get them inducted in a "first hit's free" kinda way. Broadcom customers buy chips in order to build other electronic products. Not to learn or program python or even C/C++. The original intent of the Rpi as an embedded controller is closer to what Broadcom wanted to do, and likely was how RPi talked them into agreeing with the whole thing in the first place. That market position has been taken over by the arduino family though, so the positioning of Rpi within the Broadcom general strategy isn't well matched.