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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, bu
by 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 agoWhen 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 agoI 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.