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There's a second story here. Want to build this board yourself? You can't. Try to find information about this Broadcom BCM2835 chip. It only leads back to t

There's a second story here. Want to build this board yourself? You can't. Try to find information about this Broadcom BCM2835 chip. It only leads back to the Raspberry Pi (and a teardown of the roku 2 media player). Broadcom has not released even a 1-page summary datasheet on this chip. The only specs released are in relation to the Raspberry Pi. I work for a small tech company that would LOVE to be able to use this chip and as of today it's impossible to even get the datasheet unless you are in "the club" of trusted broadcom customers (or their employee, as one raspberry pi creator is apparently?) Will this chip ever be sold to the public?

pointyhat 15y ago
Looking at Broadcom's part numbers, it's not a "current" product but it seems to fit in the same series of numbers as their 3G baseband processors and mobile multimedia processors. I get the feeling it's a new mobile multimedia processor (judging by the HDMI+ARM+3d graphics supprot) which is being conveniently repurposed. I reckon it'll be on the market soon enough but don't expect to be able to get anything out of Broadcom unless you want volume. Even Farnell don't carry their parts.
- gravitronic 15y ago
  Sounds congruent to what we've experienced in the past. Even worse is attempting to get customer support from them when you find massive problems in their part but you only ship a few thousand a year... It just irks me that while the Raspberry Pi in itself is a great product that will be a minor revolution, its impact could be so much greater if this chip was available to all developers. I guess I should shut my mouth, at least the second product to get the chip is a somewhat philanthropic effort and not another streaming media box.
  - pointyhat 15y ago
    Sounds like any large vendor :) I agree with you. I'll put my RMS hat on here, but I'm concerned that it's a 100% proprietary platform for education. The old BBC Micros that we had here in the UK were made out of standard bits and had schematics so you could strap what the hell you liked to them (or modify them). They were replaced with utter proprietary crap from Research Machines and it has been like that ever since. We need some open hardware as well if you ask me.
joezydeco 15y ago
Not just an employee, but an associate technical director at Broadcom. Others have found that the Raspberry Pi blog posts and etc are coming from Broadcom addresses. They're doing this on company time. Earlier I thought this was a good marketing thing. Other companies like TI are doing this to get chips in the hands of hackers and spread some goodwill towards future commercial users of their chips. But, as others have noted, Broadcom is a lot more standoffish with individuals that want access to sample parts and datasheets. So what is Broadcom gaining here? Inroads into educational markets? Access to open-source code written by tinkerers that they can incorporate into future EVKs and chipsets? Maybe this odd part # is just a series of chips that have failed speedbinning and are being sold off cheaply?
- gravitronic 15y ago
  The obvious guess would be their plan is to limit access to the chip until the pi became the "defacto standard" board, similar to the beagleboard or arduino, but I don't know why they're doing it. They're selling at cost, so it's not to lock in the profit. Whats the benefit of retaining control? Unless they're also going to bring the board to a consumer product and don't want competition, but that's not really their market.
  - joezydeco 15y ago
    When it comes to hobby boards, "Defacto standards" don't mean a thing to chip companies. We might like to think it matters...but Broadcom is selling hundreds of millions of parts a year to companies like Apple. Does 50,000 or even 500,000 Raspberry Pis over it's lifetime mean anything to a company like this?
    - gravitronic 15y ago
      I would agree with you but clearly it does mean something to them. The Raspberry Pi is getting a chip that is currently not available to the public As well, as described by Liz in their comments on the Quake 3 post, "Eben works for Broadcom (and they’re giving us some great support – we wouldn’t be able to have got the project this far without their generous help)" http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=106#comment-1764 http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=106#comment-1764 Maybe it is only Eben's employment at Broadcom that is helping them get support and the chip sourcing, because otherwise I agree, Broadcom would not care about this.

pointyhat 15y ago

Looking at Broadcom's part numbers, it's not a "current" product but it seems to fit in the same series of numbers as their 3G baseband processors and mobile multimedia processors. I get the feeling it's a new mobile multimedia processor (judging by the HDMI+ARM+3d graphics supprot) which is being conveniently repurposed. I reckon it'll be on the market soon enough but don't expect to be able to get anything out of Broadcom unless you want volume. Even Farnell don't carry their parts.

gravitronic 15y ago
Sounds congruent to what we've experienced in the past. Even worse is attempting to get customer support from them when you find massive problems in their part but you only ship a few thousand a year... It just irks me that while the Raspberry Pi in itself is a great product that will be a minor revolution, its impact could be so much greater if this chip was available to all developers. I guess I should shut my mouth, at least the second product to get the chip is a somewhat philanthropic effort and not another streaming media box.
- pointyhat 15y ago
  Sounds like any large vendor :) I agree with you. I'll put my RMS hat on here, but I'm concerned that it's a 100% proprietary platform for education. The old BBC Micros that we had here in the UK were made out of standard bits and had schematics so you could strap what the hell you liked to them (or modify them). They were replaced with utter proprietary crap from Research Machines and it has been like that ever since. We need some open hardware as well if you ask me.

joezydeco 15y ago

Not just an employee, but an associate technical director at Broadcom. Others have found that the Raspberry Pi blog posts and etc are coming from Broadcom addresses. They're doing this on company time. Earlier I thought this was a good marketing thing. Other companies like TI are doing this to get chips in the hands of hackers and spread some goodwill towards future commercial users of their chips. But, as others have noted, Broadcom is a lot more standoffish with individuals that want access to sample parts and datasheets. So what is Broadcom gaining here? Inroads into educational markets? Access to open-source code written by tinkerers that they can incorporate into future EVKs and chipsets? Maybe this odd part # is just a series of chips that have failed speedbinning and are being sold off cheaply?

gravitronic 15y ago
The obvious guess would be their plan is to limit access to the chip until the pi became the "defacto standard" board, similar to the beagleboard or arduino, but I don't know why they're doing it. They're selling at cost, so it's not to lock in the profit. Whats the benefit of retaining control? Unless they're also going to bring the board to a consumer product and don't want competition, but that's not really their market.
- joezydeco 15y ago
  When it comes to hobby boards, "Defacto standards" don't mean a thing to chip companies. We might like to think it matters...but Broadcom is selling hundreds of millions of parts a year to companies like Apple. Does 50,000 or even 500,000 Raspberry Pis over it's lifetime mean anything to a company like this?
  - gravitronic 15y ago
    I would agree with you but clearly it does mean something to them. The Raspberry Pi is getting a chip that is currently not available to the public As well, as described by Liz in their comments on the Quake 3 post, "Eben works for Broadcom (and they’re giving us some great support – we wouldn’t be able to have got the project this far without their generous help)" http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=106#comment-1764 http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=106#comment-1764 Maybe it is only Eben's employment at Broadcom that is helping them get support and the chip sourcing, because otherwise I agree, Broadcom would not care about this.