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Raspberry Pi receives strategic investment from Arm
- regularfry 3y agoUpton has spoken about the way that going public is in the foreseeable future. I wonder how this plays into that (or, conversely, avoids it).
- deelowe 3y ago[flagged]
- qwertox 3y agoI wanted to say: "Why?", since the strongest point of a Raspi is that you can install the latest Raspbian on any device. I recently upgraded my 1st gen which serves as an OpenVPN server to Bookworm and I had zero issues. I say "I wanted to say", because then the reality kicked in when the upgrade to Bullseye thrashed the camera stack. I don't see how ARM can do anything except for asking them to not switch to RISC-V within the next 10-15 years.
- sho_hn 3y agoMy immediate issue is that there's no support for in-place upgrade to Bookworm, which makes it a big hassle on a headless one.
- qwertox 3y agoI forgot about that! Apparently the issues do not affect server installs, it may be related to Wayland, so you might want to check dedicated forums for more info on this.
- nirav72 3y ago"enshittification" is a word that I've seen thrown around a lot this year. Hopefully Webster picks it up to add to their dictionary.
- no-reply 3y agoSomebody else did it already. [1] 1: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification
- freedomben 3y agoI'm torn because I'm sick of the word being used because it's largely used as a generic term that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, even if that is very different than the way Cory Doctorow initially used it. But, having a dictionary definition would make it much, much more easy to get consensus on what it means and have it used correctly...
- deelowe 3y agoI mean the literal definition Cory provided. > First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. The Rpi foundation appears to be at step #2. "Business customers" here has an odd definition given Rpi's business model, but I feel the overall concept still applies.
- freedomben 3y agoApologies, it probably did seem like I was lumping your comment in with my general criticism of misuse, but I didn't intend that! But also, thank you for clarifying. I very much agree! This seems like exactly the path to enshittification and I hope that a competitor can come with RISC-V soon.
- tucnak 3y agoLiterally the most annoying groupthink slogan these days; soyjak clever bastards just can't control themselves, the word almost repeats _itself_ because it's too clever to stfu.
- _cenw 3y agoThat already happened when most of the RPi 4 supply went to industry partners and not the open market with the supposed core audience. They're not much better than NVIDIA selling GPUs to miners. Intel Tremont and Gracemont are just fine for my IoT / low power server projects, thanks. And they have sane drivers, most of the time.
- MegaDeKay 3y agoYou can't compare what the Pi folks did with nvidia. The Pi folks made a difficult decision in covid to help keep small businesses afloat in the middle of a pandemic when things were going to hell while keeping their retail price the same. Forcing those businesses to stop selling and close up shop would have made matters worse for everyone. nvidia selling to miners was a greedy cash grab plain and simple.
- shrx 3y ago> Forcing those businesses to stop selling and close up shop would have made matters worse for everyone. No, it would have made matters worse for the aforementioned small businesses*, and better for private end users. edit: *and we don't even know how "small" those really are, we could be talking about tens of hundreds of thousands of units being sold.
- CodeWriter23 3y ago> while keeping their retail price the same Guess you didn’t actually try to buy a Pi 4 in the past two years. Unless you spent the time to set a bot camping on Adafruit, Sparkfun et.al, you paid around $200 to an arbitrager on Amazon or eBay. The price is still north of the original amount in the initial press release by about $6-$7 https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-from-35/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-...
- freedomben 3y agoI don't think you can blame RPi for the prices charged by resellers. That's out of their control. Classic supply and demand curve, and supply was limited. You could maybe blame them for inability to keep production high enough to meet demand, but that's a wildly different thing than what retail price they charge.
- hajile 3y ago"We'll pay you to not switch to those cheap RISC-V cores coming down the pipeline".
- tomalpha 3y agoHow much cheaper are RISC-V chips in reality? I get there might be a saving for not having to pay ARM a royalty of some kind, but are RISC-V chips cheaper in practice as a result? I was under the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the arm royalties per chip were really small.
- hajile 3y agoSiFive would practically give away their latest P870 cores (close to A78 performance levels) to get them shipping by the millions in the Pi because of the free advertising, free exposure, and massive boost it would give to the development of the RISC-V ecosystem. Once such a switch was made, Pi could even consider using free and open source cores for their low-end devices where margins are slim (an area where RISC-V has already been gaining ground rapidly).
- NewJazz 3y agoWhere can I buy one of these p870 cores and how much do they typically cost? (Or boards containing them?) These are the newest OoO cores with full 1.0 vector extensions, right?
- camel-cdr 3y agoAs a normal consumer you can't. But the predecessor P670 should be available in the SG2380 board in 2024Q3 [0]. It will have 16 P670 and 8 X280 cores, and will cost $120 to $200 (without included RAM). [0] https://forum.sophgo.com/t/about-the-sg2380-oasis-category/359 https://forum.sophgo.com/t/about-the-sg2380-oasis-category/3...
- snvzz 3y ago>P870 These cores have just been announced, and are available for licensing. You can contact SiFive if you're interested. If what you want is hardware somebody's already made, that's going to take 2-3 years as per tradition. >These are the newest OoO cores with full 1.0 vector extensions, right? Yes, but so are multiple generations of predecessors. It seems that hardware based on P670[0] and X280[1] (both match that description) will be available for purchase in less than 10 months from now[2]. 0. https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/7be0420e-dac1-4558-85bc-50c7a10787e7_p600_datasheet.pdf https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/7be0420e-dac1-4558-85bc... 1. https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/9405d3d0-35a1-4680-a259-7a5598d1ecb2_sifive-intelligence-x200-datasheet.pdf https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/9405d3d0-35a1-4680-a259... 2. https://forum.sophgo.com/t/about-the-sg2380-oasis-category/359 https://forum.sophgo.com/t/about-the-sg2380-oasis-category/3...
- repelsteeltje 3y agoNo details on the size of the investment. Apparently just making sure Eben Upton 's chip designs don't wander of to the RISC-V dark side?
- freedomben 3y agoIndeed, this is very important for ARM. IoT and small devices are still a huge market for ARM and one that is damn near monopolized by market dominance. Protecting that is one of most important "strategic" things they need worry about.
- cptskippy 3y agoFrom what I've heard, there are a lot of incompatible ISA implementations of RISC-V. Raspberry Pi adopting a specific ISA might be a tipping point in RISC-V adoption.
- snvzz 3y ago>there are a lot of incompatible ISA implementations of RISC-V That is a form of FUD that unfortunately shows up very often. In reality, all known application processors (e.g. made to run a software stack based on Linux), follow the RVA profile[0] spec. So do all Linux binary distributions known to support RISC-V. As well as the BSDs. Specifically, they currently target RVA20, and thus also support RVA22. 0. https://github.com/riscv/riscv-profiles/releases https://github.com/riscv/riscv-profiles/releases
- cptskippy 3y agoI'm not disagreeing with you that it's a bit of FUD, however what you're saying isn't entirely true either. > In reality, all known application processors (e.g. made to run a software stack based on Linux), follow the RVA profile[0] spec. What profile does Greenwave's GAP8 conform to? > Specifically, they currently target RVA20, and thus also support RVA22. Anything targeting RVA20 wouldn't be forward compatible. RVA22 added vector and floating-point extensions that a processor conforming to RVA20 wouldn't necessarily have or that wouldn't necessarily be compatible with RVA22.
- billpg 3y agoWasn't Raspberry Pi a charitable foundation or did I completely imagine that?
- capableweb 3y agoThere seems to be multiple entities: Raspberry Pi Ltd - No.08207441 (the one who received this "investment") Raspberry Pi Foundation - No.06758215 (registered charity) Raspberry Pi Foundation North America - (registered 501(c)(3)) https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gertrunde 3y agoGoing by the 2022 accounts linked in another comment, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is the charitable part, and owns 91% of Raspberry Pi Ltd (the commercial entity that makes and sells SBCs, and the subject of the ARM press release) via another company ("Raspberry Pi MidCo Ltd"). [Edit: The link wasn't in another comment, was searched for: https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundationAnnualReview2022.pdf https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda... ]
- orangepurple 3y agoDoesn't matter anyway. They shot themselves in the foot by removing hardware video encoding. I switched to the Orange Pi 5 so I can keep my video encoders and also benefit from the nice TPU.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoThis doesn't really make any sense - you can video encode 1080p H.264 on the Pi 5 in software without using more than ~25% of the CPU. And the quality, if you don't mind trading more CPU, will be far superior than the hardware encoders ever were.
- phkahler 3y agoI remember seeing an ad many decades ago for a PC ad-in board for encoding and decoding JPEG. You know, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and that might have been a thing for desktop publishing or whatever. General purpose CPU has gotten fast enough to do a lot of things that used to benefit from hardware acceleration.
- mhandley 3y agoA little over 30 years ago when I started working on multimedia conferencing over the Internet, for some reason we had a couple of hardware JPEG decoder ISA (?) cards from Bitfield Oy, a Finish company (if I recall correctly). I can't find any documentation on them now, as this predates NCSA Mosaic and the start of the web's rapid rise. Anything before about 1994 doesn't really exist online. JPEG was brand new back then, but even so it seemed a little odd, as they were actually slower than software JPEG decoding on the Sun SparcStations we were using. It might have made sense on a PC, as PCs were significantly slower than Unix workstations at the time and we looked down on the poor folks who had to use them with pity, but I'm pretty sure the market must have been small and rapidly followed the dinosaurs into extinction.
- spicyjpeg 3y agoThe original PlayStation's main SoC (which is incidentally about 30 years old at this point) included a trimmed down JPEG decoder [1] meant to be used for video playback. It still relied on the CPU to handle Huffman decompression [2], but it allowed that otherwise anemic 33 MHz MIPS core to push 320x240 video at 30fps. [1] https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/macroblockdecodermdec/ https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/macroblockdecodermdec/ [2] https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK/blob/master/examples/mdec/strvideo/main.c#L11-L27 https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK/blob/master/examples/...
- germandiago 3y agoRISC-V shadow is large...
- ensignavenger 3y agoI thought Raspberry Pi was a foundation? Do they have a for profit company too, like Mozilla Inc. vs Mozilla Foundation? Are they then selling off (part of)the for profit corp?
- jacquesm 3y agoIt's perfectly possible to invest in a project like this (the Limited, not the foundation) because of the side effects: more developers on ARM -> eventually more ARM licenses sold.
- nsteel 3y agoYes. https://www.raspberrypi.org/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/ or https://www.raspberrypi.com/about/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/about/
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThey are mostly a for profit company. The foundation is a cherry on the cake these days.
- Namidairo 3y agoIt still amazes me sometimes, that the most popular SBC line remains to be entirely Broadcom, of all vendors. However there might be a bit of personal bias there, from the long time exposure to the Broadcom binary wireless driver (wl). Hi Jeff.
- jonp888 3y agoI'm sure they don't want to end up like the Arduino ecosystem and be in a position where they have to spend all the money on the software development and other vendors undercut their hardware. So they need to have hardware their competitors can't replicate, which means Broadcom or custom silicon. My guess is the latter is where it will eventually go, since they already dipped their toe in the water with the Pico.
- badcppdev 3y agoAlso the IO controller on the RPi5 is custom silicon "RP1 is our I/O controller for Raspberry Pi 5, designed by the same team at Raspberry Pi that delivered the RP2040 microcontroller, and implemented, like RP2040, on TSMC’s mature 40LP process. It provides two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 interfaces; a Gigabit Ethernet controller; two four-lane MIPI transceivers for camera and display; analogue video output; 3.3V general-purpose I/O (GPIO); and the usual collection of GPIO-multiplexed low-speed interfaces (UART, SPI, I2C, I2S, and PWM). A four-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface provides a 16Gb/s link back to BCM2712. Under development since 2016, RP1 is by a good margin the longest-running, most complex, and (at $15 million) most expensive program we’ve ever undertaken here at Raspberry Pi. It has undergone substantial evolution over the years, as our projected requirements have changed: the C0 step used on Raspberry Pi 5 is the third major revision of the silicon. And while its interfaces differ in fine detail from those of BCM2711, they have been designed to be very similar from a functional perspective, ensuring a high degree of compatibility with earlier Raspberry Pi devices." https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoAren't all the popular pine64 SBCs rockchip? And the big OrangePi SBCs?
- klelatti 3y agoRPi is a member of the RISC-V foundation but I don't think that that is anything about saving money, it's about the extra flexibility that it would have given RPi, as they are doing quite a lot of their own silicon these days. Complete speculation, but perhaps with an investment from Arm both sides would be more comfortable with closer collaboration and more tailored Arm cores. Plus, RPi probably need the capital.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoIt's a strategic investment to steer them away from risc-v, if needed.
- klelatti 3y agoMy point was that it's not about price (which the current top comment says).
- mytailorisrich 3y agoYes and my reply wasn't about price. No need to be snarky. Edit: And I did reply to the substance of your comment: I think it's above all about keeping them away from ris-v, not flexibility and collaboration (though of course closer collaboration means keeping them away from risc-v). Jeez...
- klelatti 3y agoWhy did you reply then? I've removed the snark but perhaps it's better to engage with the substance of a comment. Edit : You didn’t engage with the substance of the comment which was about RPi’s perspective but instead made an unrelated comment about why Arm would do the investment.
- freedomben 3y agoI don't know if you edited it out, but at least currently it is unclear to me that you're commenting on the perspective of RPi rather than ARM (which is TFA). Without that, it's unreasonable to be annoyed by the reply comment IMHO. Particularly with snark (which removal I applaud) is quite counterproductive.
- rickdeckard 3y agoThat's quite strategic indeed. Could be fatal to have RPi create a low-entry barrier for a cheap standardized RISC-V architecture, accumulate alot of (student) developers and applications, and then have the same architecture offered in high-performance (datacenter) hardware as well...
- tcldr 3y agoThe 'Happy Meal' strategy. a.k.a Get 'em while they're young. What you learn on today, is what you'll mass produce on tomorrow.
- m463 3y agothe mindshare of the raspberry pi is huge with more than 40 million units sold.
- Narann 3y agoWe arrive to the point that anything RPi touch see a massive foundation solidification. Even if RPi release an electronic RISC-V hardware, this foundation solidification would harm ARM on the long run.
- Lio 3y agoAs I remember it the Raspberry Pi was originally conceived as a latter day BBC Micro[1] for people to learn on. The Pi’s A and B naming scheme for instance harks back to the Beeb B. The A in Arm originally stood for “Acorn”, the company behind both the BBC Micro and Arm processors. The Beeb was also the host computer used to develop the first Arm processors. So there’s something rather nice about this investment. It feels like a natural fit. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
- dspillett 3y ago> The Pi’s A and B naming scheme for instance harks back to the Beeb B. And, in fact, the BBC Model A. As with the Pi models, the biggest difference between the BBC computer models A & B was RAM: the A having 16KiB and the B 32KiB. There were other differences too, but these were not as significant to many: a particular chip that provided IO, and the external ports that cam with it, were only available on the B or an user-upgraded A, and this also provided a couple of timers that one or two bits of software used (so there was some software that was model-B only despite fitting in the smaller RAM of tjhe model-A).
- fidotron 3y agoI part think the Raspberry Pi Pico is much more significant than most people have appreciated. Programming with the C SDK on it is quite ridiculously entertaining, but it is clear the hardware of the RP2040 is close to inspired. Were I ARM I'd be far more concerned about a RISC-V spin off of the pico than the mainline pi devices.
- Havoc 3y agoI’d say pi zero w is more significant. The second something has wifi it opens up a lot of options on projects that just don’t exist with airgapped
- m463 3y agoI see the pico as a microcontroller, which is a different animal in comparison to the general-purpose cpu+gpu+peripherals of the arm pi that runs a full OS.
- fragmede 3y agoThe Pico is a failure of Raspberry branding. As mentioned it's basically a microcontroller, doesn't run Linux, and doesn't hook up to a monitor or keyboard/mouse in same fashion. Which is fine, it's quite powerful! But imo should have used different branding to indicate thus as it's quite a different adventure.
- askvictor 3y agoOn the flip side, there are now Arduino boards that run Linux. I think from a branding perspective, you'd be mad not to capitalise on the branding you've already got.
- nfriedly 3y agoGood for them! I know lots of folks are suggesting that this is aimed at preventing Raspberry Pi from going RISK-V and they're probably not wrong. But, on the other hand, every single Raspberry Pi to date has been Arm-based, and they seem to be fairly conservative in terms of backwards compatibility. Even today, the recommended Raspberry Pi OS on https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/ is 32-bit in order to ensure compatibility with every model they've ever made. (The Pi Zero is the only model they still sell that is 32-bit only.) The only places where I think RISC-V might have been likely were future iterations of the Pi Pico, or ancillary chips like the RP1. And that is probably less likely with this investment.
- Narishma 3y ago> The Pi Zero is the only model they still sell that is 32-bit only. Not true. They're still selling all their previous models.
- nfriedly 3y agoOh, you're probably right; I don't know what deals they have with business customers. I should have added "to the public" - I don't believe any B2C vendors still stock the Pi 1 or original 32-bit version of the Pi 2.
- Narishma 3y agoThey still sell them to the public, though stock availability will vary greatly between resellers and regions.
- t43562 3y agoThe Raspberry Pi Foundation's offices are in Cambridge where ARM is and there are ex Broadcom engineers (I think?) working there so just culturally I can see why ARM is a natural connection. I think this "lets make everything RISCV" meme (like "lets rewrite everything in rust") is going to get a cold evaluation as it doesn't originate there and the cold evalution will be that ARM is a big stable player that isn't going to disappear suddenly or radically change focus, that the cost of its licenses isn't material to RPi and that RPi's success is not endangered by sticking with ARM ... as things stand today. RP1 and software support are their strengths and I think they won't take risks with instruction set changes or even the vendor of their particular ARM chip. So I think this strategic investment is probably equivalent to a marketing cost - it won't stop RPi doing RISCV because they wouldn't do it anyhow. It will just help Rpi reach more people.
- justincormack 3y agoRaspberry Pi did join the Risc-V foundation a while back.
- freedomben 3y agoInteresting, I didn't realize the connections were so deep. It does make sense. Do you think RPi might be hurt by not adopting RISC-V if it takes off? If some of their competitors offer it, could one of them dethrone RPi?
- entropicdrifter 3y agoNot the person you asked, but I have opinions: It'd depend entirely on the level of support a competitor offers, right? I mean that's why RPi is still so popular despite there having been a number of ARM competitors offering more power per dollar for like a decade now. The strong software support led to a strong community/overall ecosystem, which has led to a strong install base, which further improved the community and ecosystem. It's a combination of first mover advantage with continued strong software support that keeps them so prominent as-is. I don't see why a different ISA would fundamentally change that formula.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoWelp another one bites the dust Hopefully it’s not another two decades before we get totally open hardware platform as good as RaspPi has been
- snvzz 3y agoMilk-V and StarFive (of VisionFive fame) both have low-cost boards with next generation, RVA22+V compliant RISC-V CPUs (faster than the just released RPi5), planned for 2024. Raspberry Pi already missed the RISC-V train with the RPi5. It could very well have been the first board with Vector 1.0, but they did unfortunately not make that choice years ago, so we ended up with this RPi5 instead.
- MenhirMike 3y agoI am hoping that there would be a real Desktop Raspberry Pi in the future. I know that the Raspberry Pi 400 exists, which was clearly aimed at that, but an SD Card as primary storage just ain't it. The Pi 5 supports NVMe, but needs an adapter. I would like something that has NVMe and non-USB connected networking, with sufficient cooling, with a good keyboard. GPIO should still be exposed (like on the Pi 400). I don't expect a PCIe expansion slot, basically I just want a beefed up Pi 400 to be a true BBC Micro successor. (And for the love of all that's good and holy, proper HDMI ports. And a proper keyboard, not a laptop keyboard like on the Pi 400. Heck, steal the Amiga 600 design.)
- heresie-dabord 3y agoI use as a daily driver the R.Pi 400 booting from external NVMe. This is not difficult to configure. It's a delight to use.
- MenhirMike 3y agoYeah, it just kinda ruins the aesthetic of an all-in-one wedge if you need to connect an external drive, also I'd prefer it to not be USB (I assume you use an NVMe-to-USB chassis?). So I'd love to see that being done internally. Essentially a RPi 5 with an actual NVMe slot and full size HDMI, in a wedge chassis with a better keyboard.
- snvzz 3y agoI find the timing interesting. RISC-V Summit 2023 is next week[0]. Like every year, many announcements are expected. And they have, so far, never failed to be higher profile than the previous years' Summit. 0. https://riscv.org/event/risc-v-summit-2023/ https://riscv.org/event/risc-v-summit-2023/
- thomasnancy7678 3y ago[dead]