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Welcome to the world of firmware. That’s why RaspberryPi won and pivoted to B2B compute module sales as they managed to leech broad community support for their

Welcome to the world of firmware. That’s why RaspberryPi won and pivoted to B2B compute module sales as they managed to leech broad community support for their chips and then turn around and sell it to industry who were tired of garbage BSPs. The reality for actual products is even worse. Qualcomm and Broadcom (even before the PE acquisition) are some of the worst companies to work with imaginable. I’ve had situations where we wasted a month tracking down a bug only for our Qualcomm account manager to admit that the bug was in a peripheral and in their errata already but couldn’t share the whole thing with us, among many other horror stories. I’d rather crawl through a mile of broken glass than have to deal with that again, so I have an extreme aversion to using anything but RPi, as distasteful as that is sometimes.

utopiah 6mo ago
What's Qualcomm and Broadcom moat? Is it "just" IP or could they be replaced by a slower more expensive equivalent, say FPGA based, relying on open building blocks?
- Yizahi 6mo ago
  The range of their offerings is immense and I think each product should be evaluated individually to competition. But just as an anecdote from my company - to create a full spectrum DOCSIS signal our HW team used multiple huge FPGA chips, I think it was Altera 10 or something (device is EOS by now) and that only for the DAC (kinda), there were separate CPU, separate 10G switch, separate utility FPGA, separate memory, separate everything. And it had to be glued together with some insane mash of code on top of the FPGA blobs which not always work as expected. All in all it was a ten unit monster which used something like 4000W in steady state and a dozen of industrial coolers at max to cool it off. And today that is replaced with a single relatively tiny in area chip (those old FPGAs were huge) from Broadcom, which does literally everything and complies with newest standard and uses tens of watts of power, and it is passively cooled. It's not quite the correct comparison since arch changed in the meantime, but if someone would build an exact replacement for that older big device using new chips and have the same specs, it would be half as big and use under 1000W or even less. And all software is ready to use without reinventing half of it manually. But yeah, Broadcom's support is slow and opaque. and they will stall any non-major customer for month for almost any request, because they are prioritizing different tasks internally. It's like a drug dealer dependency and there is only one dealer in your town :) .
- throwup238 6mo ago
  It’s a combination of IP and deep institutional expertise. The 5G standards plus other important protocol documentation, for example, are on the order of fifty thousand pages, built on decades of experience with edge/2g, 3g, and LTE. That’s just the documentation on the protocol, the real secret is in the mixed signal ICs that require custom cell libraries which Qualcomm/Broadcom work with fabs to develop for their own use. The only other company of note in this field is Apple which bought the initial IP from Intel (which bought it from Infineon, another IC manufacturer), so we’re talking about something so technically complex that only the deepest pockets and expertise can make any headway. When Apple bought Intel’s modem IP, over two thousand employees transferred with the deal, to give you an idea of the scale. That’s just the radios, which is their bread and butter. A lot of their other products have similar barriers to entry. As the sibling comment noted, FPGAs aren’t even in the running. Ignoring their power consumption, the biggest FPGAs only have a hundred thousand or so logic elements. While its not easy to map that to number of transistors per se, even a legacy nodes are capable of much more complex designs than you can fit on an cutting edge FPGA. This really makes a difference even at the lower end because you have to get the timing right between all the different parts of your logic, and making everything smaller gives a lot more room for error (its a lot easier to put delay lines than to reconfigure a section of your design to fit closer to another section).
pjmlp 6mo ago
Which is why Raspberry PIs are more valuable to me than an x86 NUC, even if the prices are similar. There are no ARM NUCs at such prices, and even if there were the GNU/Linux support would be horrible.
- joe_mamba 6mo ago
  I don't get how your argument infers from your parents comment. To me it would be the opposite conclusion: stay away from ARM SBCs with proprietary firmware and just go Intel-x86 NUCs if you don't want surprises. And yes, RPI was(is?) a proprietary-FW SBC as the Broadcom VideoCore GPU driver was never open sourced from the start and relied on community efforts for reverse engineering, which the rPI foundation then leveraged to sell their products at a markup to commercial customers after the FOSS community did all the legwork for them for free. Like so long and thanks for all the fish. Meanwhile Intel iGPUs had full linux kernel drivers out of the box. That's why they're great Jellyfin transcoding servers.
  - pjmlp 6mo ago
    If I don't want surprises!?! I had to throw away, literally, a Gigabyte BRIX, because its firmware did not recognised any distro I throwed at it from internal drives, only if connected externally over USB. The experiements with various kinds of SSD modules, Linux distros, and UEFI booting partitions, end up killing the motherboard in someway due to me manipulating it all the time, whatever. Raspberry PIs are the only NUCs I can buy in something like Conrad Electronic, and be assured it actually works without me going through it as if I had just bough Linux Unleashed in 1995's Summer.
    - joe_mamba 6mo ago
      Luckily, the X86 NUC ecosystem is not defined by your unfortunate experience with a Gigabyte BRIX. Exceptions don't define the norm.
      - pjmlp 6mo ago
        Which physical stores sell X86 NUCs with OEM supported Linux distributions pre-installed?
Schlagbohrer 6mo ago
Ouch. I sympathize, having gone through similar hoops with Renesas. We buy a hardware product from them and try to develop on it but they won't share more than a few superficial datasheets with us. And I know they have way more manuals / datasheets because they'll sometimes drip the info to me when I ask specific questions, but they won't just give us them so we can do it ourselves. This is a common business model sadly where the seller wants the buyer to buy an additional support contract for any actual firmware development.

utopiah 6mo ago

What's Qualcomm and Broadcom moat? Is it "just" IP or could they be replaced by a slower more expensive equivalent, say FPGA based, relying on open building blocks?

Yizahi 6mo ago
The range of their offerings is immense and I think each product should be evaluated individually to competition. But just as an anecdote from my company - to create a full spectrum DOCSIS signal our HW team used multiple huge FPGA chips, I think it was Altera 10 or something (device is EOS by now) and that only for the DAC (kinda), there were separate CPU, separate 10G switch, separate utility FPGA, separate memory, separate everything. And it had to be glued together with some insane mash of code on top of the FPGA blobs which not always work as expected. All in all it was a ten unit monster which used something like 4000W in steady state and a dozen of industrial coolers at max to cool it off. And today that is replaced with a single relatively tiny in area chip (those old FPGAs were huge) from Broadcom, which does literally everything and complies with newest standard and uses tens of watts of power, and it is passively cooled. It's not quite the correct comparison since arch changed in the meantime, but if someone would build an exact replacement for that older big device using new chips and have the same specs, it would be half as big and use under 1000W or even less. And all software is ready to use without reinventing half of it manually. But yeah, Broadcom's support is slow and opaque. and they will stall any non-major customer for month for almost any request, because they are prioritizing different tasks internally. It's like a drug dealer dependency and there is only one dealer in your town :) .
throwup238 6mo ago
It’s a combination of IP and deep institutional expertise. The 5G standards plus other important protocol documentation, for example, are on the order of fifty thousand pages, built on decades of experience with edge/2g, 3g, and LTE. That’s just the documentation on the protocol, the real secret is in the mixed signal ICs that require custom cell libraries which Qualcomm/Broadcom work with fabs to develop for their own use. The only other company of note in this field is Apple which bought the initial IP from Intel (which bought it from Infineon, another IC manufacturer), so we’re talking about something so technically complex that only the deepest pockets and expertise can make any headway. When Apple bought Intel’s modem IP, over two thousand employees transferred with the deal, to give you an idea of the scale. That’s just the radios, which is their bread and butter. A lot of their other products have similar barriers to entry. As the sibling comment noted, FPGAs aren’t even in the running. Ignoring their power consumption, the biggest FPGAs only have a hundred thousand or so logic elements. While its not easy to map that to number of transistors per se, even a legacy nodes are capable of much more complex designs than you can fit on an cutting edge FPGA. This really makes a difference even at the lower end because you have to get the timing right between all the different parts of your logic, and making everything smaller gives a lot more room for error (its a lot easier to put delay lines than to reconfigure a section of your design to fit closer to another section).

pjmlp 6mo ago

Which is why Raspberry PIs are more valuable to me than an x86 NUC, even if the prices are similar. There are no ARM NUCs at such prices, and even if there were the GNU/Linux support would be horrible.

joe_mamba 6mo ago
I don't get how your argument infers from your parents comment. To me it would be the opposite conclusion: stay away from ARM SBCs with proprietary firmware and just go Intel-x86 NUCs if you don't want surprises. And yes, RPI was(is?) a proprietary-FW SBC as the Broadcom VideoCore GPU driver was never open sourced from the start and relied on community efforts for reverse engineering, which the rPI foundation then leveraged to sell their products at a markup to commercial customers after the FOSS community did all the legwork for them for free. Like so long and thanks for all the fish. Meanwhile Intel iGPUs had full linux kernel drivers out of the box. That's why they're great Jellyfin transcoding servers.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  If I don't want surprises!?! I had to throw away, literally, a Gigabyte BRIX, because its firmware did not recognised any distro I throwed at it from internal drives, only if connected externally over USB. The experiements with various kinds of SSD modules, Linux distros, and UEFI booting partitions, end up killing the motherboard in someway due to me manipulating it all the time, whatever. Raspberry PIs are the only NUCs I can buy in something like Conrad Electronic, and be assured it actually works without me going through it as if I had just bough Linux Unleashed in 1995's Summer.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
    Luckily, the X86 NUC ecosystem is not defined by your unfortunate experience with a Gigabyte BRIX. Exceptions don't define the norm.
    - pjmlp 6mo ago
      Which physical stores sell X86 NUCs with OEM supported Linux distributions pre-installed?

Schlagbohrer 6mo ago

Ouch. I sympathize, having gone through similar hoops with Renesas. We buy a hardware product from them and try to develop on it but they won't share more than a few superficial datasheets with us. And I know they have way more manuals / datasheets because they'll sometimes drip the info to me when I ask specific questions, but they won't just give us them so we can do it ourselves. This is a common business model sadly where the seller wants the buyer to buy an additional support contract for any actual firmware development.