Comment by squarefoot
19 days ago
I highly doubt so. In fact, save for the RP2040 which isn't Linux capable (0), all their processors aren't for sale anywhere; Broadcom simply won't sell them to you, no matter if you order 1 or 100000. That is, you can't build your product around one of their CPU and you have to put their entire boards in you product instead, which translates in huge costs, no industrial rated parts and forced use of SD cards for system disks, which in that context are a no-no. The RPi is a hobbyist board with a huge potential for teaching, but I wouldn't consider it for anything beyond that use.
0: yeah, I know you can run it in theory; I mean in a usable way.
It's not a hypothetical: "professional" or "industrial" use is what most new Pis are used for.
There's the compute modules
> no industrial rated parts and forced use of SD cards for system disks, which in that context are a no-no
They kinda work if the system is not mission critical. Just have them self reboot every 4 hours :)
Isn't their Compute Module 4 SOM industrial rated?
That forces you to sandwich two boards together (connector, more costs, etc), and still you have no freedom regarding which peripherals to place around the RPi SoC.
The average integrator doesn't want to mess around with things like DDR5 routing or designing power supplies for the SoC. There are lots of other companies such as AMD and Nvidia selling SOMs so the fact that they are selling SOMs can hardly be something to complain about.
There’s a free PCIe lane that you can put whatever you want on
We use them for automation and data collection in our chem lab. I’d call that professional.