Raspberry Pi foundation is a ploy to maintain Broadcom market domination by selling the chips at fab cost to prevent viable open source hardware at scale. Broadcom is one of the primary reasons you do not own your hardware and devices. Almost everything they make is undocumented and proprietary. Indeed even the Rπ chip is proprietary with only a partial datasheet. The Rπ Foundation has made the peripheral I/O very accessible and maintained a solid distro branch for ease of access. The Rπ is based on a TV set-top box chip with the vast amount of silicon going to the TV tuner functionality that is totally undocumented. These chips are made on a trailing edge fab node and only using the excess down time of the fab when there is no other paying work. Ultimately this is an attempt to delay the inevitable revolution that is RISC-V and sap as much money as possible using anticompetitive practices.
Raspberry Pi foundation is a ploy to maintain Broadcom market domination by selling the chips at fab cost to prevent viable open source hardware at scale. Broadcom is one of the primary reasons you do not own your hardware and devices. Almost everything they make is undocumented and proprietary. Indeed even the Rπ chip is proprietary with only a partial datasheet. The Rπ Foundation has made the peripheral I/O very accessible and maintained a solid distro branch for ease of access. The Rπ is based on a TV set-top box chip with the vast amount of silicon going to the TV tuner functionality that is totally undocumented. These chips are made on a trailing edge fab node and only using the excess down time of the fab when there is no other paying work. Ultimately this is an attempt to delay the inevitable revolution that is RISC-V and sap as much money as possible using anticompetitive practices.