Broadcom SoCs

Ah, I mixed up Qualcomm and Broadcom!

 

I'm guessing "cellular baseband" doesn't automatically conjure up "smartphone socs" for some.

 

It's impolite to call MediaTek a Chinese company

 

Let's just say I'm anticipating the not-so-distant future.

 

Unless Korea would merge with China in the non foreseeable future I don't get your errr joke

 

What? MediaTek is Taiwanese!

 

True. Replace Taiwan with Korea in the question then

 

Yes, I think they'll be reunified within a few decades. But we're getting ever so slightly off topic.

 

I assume it has been done in order to maintain maximum compatibility.
It is the community and platform that has developed over the past 3 years which sets them apart from the competitors which have sprung up since.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-2-on-sale/

 

3M Raspberry had been sold by last June. The closest competitor most likely is the BeagleBone and this had only sold 100k as of December 2013. I wouldn't be surprised to learn no other board exceeded 50K and most sold <10K.

 

Raspberry Pi 2 also seems set to greatly expand on its popularity with official Windows 10 support. That will likely further distance themselves from the competition and further justify Broadcom's investment in the custom SoC.

Regards,
SB

 

its Windows 10 IoT sku ... not FULL Windows 10 or Windows RT more specifically ... There will be certain things that arnt part of the IoT sku ...

 

Well the Tegra line is really quite shite from the mobile perspective.

 

I was present at the launch event and Eben Upton specifically stated that Broadcom created a new SoC just for the Pi 2. Its a very minor change to the BCM2835..basically the only thing which changes is the CPU so it likely was a very low effort, low cost design. Not much power optimization required either as it isnt exactly a mobile device (The other reason I suspect this is that I asked a question on power consumption and the reply was idle power for the Pi 2 is the same as the Pi B+. Idle power should have come down with the move to Cortex A7 and presumably its on a 28nm process). They've sold 4.5M+ Pi's to date and the target volume for the Pi 2 is 3M+ per year so the design cost is probably justified anyway.

And as kalelovil has already mentioned, it is intentionally a minimal change design to maintain backwards compatibility.

I dont think its a certainty that they will move to ARMv8 for the next Pi, they could well stick to ARM v7 for cost and compatibility reasons. This isn't exactly a segment which really needs 64 bit support. However, it is likely 2+ years away before we see a successor..and by then the ARM ecosystem would probably be concentrated around ARMv8 so I suppose it is a possibility. And the current gen will continue to be sold for a long time..so they could go for major changes to the next gen. Good question about the GPU though..it will have to be beefed up if they seriously want to compete in the Windows 10 market.

But how good will the performance be on Windows 10. We saw Windows RT on a Tegra 3..which is significantly more powerful..and the performance was not exactly spectacular. Windows 10 may be lighter and more efficient..but I dont think it can make up for the sheer lack of CPU and GPU power. The only major benefit of Windows 10 support that I can see is app and program compatibility.

Here are some pics of the device if anyone is interested. Apologies for the poor quality..I only had my mobile phone with me.

 

It's not just Vulkan missing. The SoC is only GLES 2.0 capable (and just barely at that). The ALUs are fairly capable but the rest of the GPU more looks like a PC gpu from the d3d8 era...

 

Eben Upton claimed (in a podcast on the raspberry pi site) that they have h265 decoding now (he specially mentioned pirates).