Arm Acquires Minority Stake in Raspberry Pi
Arm Acquires Minority Stake in Raspberry Pi
They want to "persuade" them to not use cheap open RISC-V cores.
RISC-V is inevitable. ARM would do well to start building IP on the architecture before they're left in the dust by SiFive and friends.
Like, right now the best RISC-V cores are already faster than the A72 core on the Pi 4. A few years before and these same companies were only competing for the microcontroller market.
The Raspberry Pico M0 is almost as power efficient as the ARM Blackpill M4, some other RISC-V processors fall behind in that department but it's almost always a trade-off with speed. I must say the ARM's system on a chip walled garden philosophy is met with a lot of apprehension from me, especially in past examples like Mac products and Smart TVs where users sometimes resorted to building custom chip mounts and testing random inputs just to be able to eventually change firmware. Can't say I'm a fan of the company or happy about this development.
Interesting. In the latest Amp Hour Podcast Episode about RPi, Chris Gammell asked about the ARM-Connection and if there are any ideas about going the RISC way one day. James Adams and Liam Fraser answered very diplomatic (like "good Architecture, exciting, but we know arm and their benefits too well"). I guess there is now no open path anymore for RPi ever going down that road.
At the moment their current OS is backwards compatible with the 32-bit Model B+ they released back around 2014, so only one distro to maintain and one set of kernel modules etc. I can imagine they probably have a very close relationship with Broadcom at this point too...
It's slightly disappointing, but it's still very, very early days for RISC-V, some things just aren't there yet like the value for money, performance per watt, and support for various hardware features. In a few years though things will look very different...
AFAIK Broadcom/Broadcom employees is/are who founded the RaspberryPi Foundation for educational purposes.
Edit: after a bit of googling this isn't accurate but Broadcom does supply funding and has some employees on the board so it seems they play a big role in the organization.
Rpi is basically just a broadcom promotional tool that got out of hand.
So we stay on orange pi if we want ARM I guess…
Isn't that the opposite of what they were talking about...?
Bah, there's so many RPi clones and offshoots now I wonder if they can even survive the coming market. Especially when RISC-V SBC's are becoming more common.
It will all boil down to software/os support
Its slowly happening. ExplainingComputers has had good results using a RISC-V SBC.
This. I buy RPi because it's the cheapest/lowest-power-consumption computer where you can get actual good support and good guides online on how to solve common problems with it, not because it's the best bang-for-buck. I think about the weird-ass problems I had with my RPis and I'd hate to deal with that crap without access to the amount of help online you get with a Pi.
RISC-V SBC's are indeed becoming more common but they aren't quite here for the consumer end, not atleast yet. Cool simple video about it: https://youtu.be/RhPKZ5JpbHw
They are not much cheaper though. Often they're even more expensive than a Pi with similar specs.
Hilarious. Money corrupts all. Next up, an organization that wants to take the original Raspberry Pi’s goal and extend that open model to all parts of a computer system including the hardware. IMO, whoever wants to spend the up-front money to take over that role is going to get very, very rich.
Pine64 is basically this.
I would throw money at Pine64 if I could, sadly right now I actually only need a new soldering iron so opted for their Pinecil.
I love that they take literally anything and make an open source variant: phone, ARM laptop, SBC, smart soldering iron, smart watch, IP camera, and even earbuds!
Kind of wish they could do a collab with Fairphone at some point... FP handle the fairtrade hardware sourcing and manufacture, and P64 handle the OSS firmware
If you want a slice of this pie, it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg.