Comment by pclmulqdq
17 days ago
I think a lot of people don't realize that there was a decent size, but small market for SBCs for low-volume embedded work (including hobbyists) before Raspberry Pi. You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price. Often, a processor vendor would explicitly provide support for these things because it was a good vector for selling chips.
Broadcom, having never wanted anything to do with this market since volumes were too low, had an abundance of a CPU SKU that was good for this. So some broadcom engineers founded Raspberry Pi to use up this excess stock, essentially getting these chips for free. The original RPi blew every other SBC out of the water on price performance (and many manufacturers out of the market) because by getting the most expensive component for free, they could sell Pis for an extremely low price. It also massively expanded the market for SBCs, as hobbyists flooded in to work with RPis.
5-10 years ago, the sweetheart deal with Broadcom went away. Now Raspberry Pi has to compete with everyone else for Broadcom SoCs, and during the semiconductor shortage of 2020, Broadcom had tremendous leverage. Now, Raspberry Pi pricing is nothing special, but they still have the brand name and they have captured the community (on the back of behavior that was borderline anticompetitive).
This is spot on. There is a market for small SBCs that spans from weapons to washing machines. When the RPi was introduced it threw a huge wrench into that market because it came in, with an operating system and storage, at under the price for the typical enclosure, much less the board itself of the existing systems. Look at PC104 systems for example.
The two pieces that have to be in place, as 'threshold' requirements are
1) The SBC exists and is available from a manufacturer
2) The same manufacturer provides an OS for that board and its associated board support package (BSP) which is drivers for all the I/O and system support functions.
The industry is full of people who went out of business because they chose Vendor A's SBC and Vendor B's OS, only to fail to deliver when it didn't work with Vendor A and Vendor B point at the other saying it was their problem. So people just don't do that any more.
What most vendors in the SBC space, prior to the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, didn't have was 20 to 30 thousand programmers writing random bits of code. What that meant was the Pi's feature set exploded rapidly, what's more there were lots of free tutorials on programming it.
In the SBC space before Pi that "Programmer Training" was one of the ways the vendor made better margins at $500/hr for a class of "up to 15 students" at our facilities.
So before, higher priced SBC + BSP, and you had to send your programmers on a road trip to the vendors facility to get the hands on training, and then you had to pay every time you made a service request.
After, cheap SBC + BSP!, a bunch of different programming videos on the web for free! Program doesn't work? Just ask the community of enthusiasts what they think!
We are not surprised a whole lot of the smaller SBC vendors closed down after that.
I recently sat through a demonstration from Arduino, they're trying to get into that space with a "Pro" line of SBCs and enclosures.
https://store-usa.arduino.cc/collections/pro-family
Yup. That is where the money is, it isn't in "hobbyists".
It will be interesting to see if the RISC-V efforts will allow for vendors to supply "50 year" SBCs (which is to say they are guaranteed to have pin-for-pin and bug-for-bug replacement SBCs for the period of 50 years.) That was a weapon system requirement back in the day that got waived for electronics because vendors couldn't "force" chip makers to keep making the chips they would need for repairs when there was no volume. But if you can define a socket/footprint and then drop in an FPGA "core" which can evolve but always appears to the circuit to be the same processor, that will be an interesting evolution point.
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> I think a lot of people don't realize that there was a decent size, but small market for SBCs for low-volume embedded work (including hobbyists) before Raspberry Pi. You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price. Often, a processor vendor would explicitly provide support for these things because it was a good vector for selling chips.
Before RPi became really popular and the 4 came out, I used BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, Aria G25, Gumstix, Cubieboard, i.MX devkits, and spun custom boards using Marvell, TI, Freescale (now NXP), and Qualcomm CPUs - I don't remember any of them having as good a BSP or being as easy to develop with as the RPi was five years ago. Maybe my memory is (very) faulty but the experience was leagues worse. PTSD-inducing level of worse. I wasted weeks or months on every major project shaving silicon yaks that should have been handled by the vendor (and is now handled by the RPi community).
The modern i.MX toolchain may now be comparable many years later but I've long since given up on everything else since CM4 came out in 2020.
My understanding is that they lost the sweetheart deal after they pivoted to supporting commercial, right in time for the pandemic supply crunch.
Yocto works the same way whether it’s Pi or iMX, most of the learning curve has nothing to do with the SoC. So it’s really strange to hear that your Pi workflow is better than anything you’d get with another chip..
BSP quality is famously variable by board vendor, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niH1-NB6W8w
But on a Pi you don't have to use Yocto. Raspbian is always faster to develop for.
Source: have worked on both Pi based solutions and custom hardware with yocto.
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Not using Yocto simplifies and speeds development extremely, unless you have dedicated staff familiar with Yocto. It’s a big reason to prefer Pi.
No, your memory is spot on. I also eval'd dozens of ARM (and some x86) SBCs for embedded use back in the early/mid-2010s and most of the BSPs were awful. You'd be locked into some ancient several-year old Linux kernels and documentation (and even actual hardware support) was often buggy/incomplete. God help you if you need to customize the boot/spin your own (Yocto was still new then, I assume life is a bit easier now).
> I think a lot of people don't realize that there was a decent size, but small market for SBCs for low-volume embedded work (including hobbyists) before Raspberry Pi. You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price.
And you still can! The big innovation from Raspberry Pi was making it all feel very accessible through the documentation, community, and various utilities to configure things via menus instead of by editing files.
The Raspberry Pi was rarely the best board, but it was the easiest to recommend to beginners because you could point them to volumes of documentation and community threads.
Agreed... great community support, generally "just works" and even if you don't use half the features, it's a more reliable baseline.
This business history would add valuable context to RPi wiki, or a public reference on the history of SBCs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
Joining the queue behind the histories of the subsequently retconned sole credit for the RPI's design, and the termination of E Upton as the Foundation's CEO.
Drop the info
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While I agree... it has been much better supported than the alternatives. I've tried several other SBCs and they have all had issues that I didn't experience with the RPi. Not that RPi hasn't had issues of its' own. Namely in power requirements, the USB-C in physical but not electronic sense for power, to overloading most USB power supplies in practical use in Pi 4B models.
I switched to the cheaper Intel mini pcs when RPi supplies were short, and scalping made it much more expensive. A whole PC with more ram, case, psu and faster storage that was faster for under $200 vs $150+ for an 8GB RPi 4 board only was a no brainer.
> essentially getting these chips for free
> by getting the most expensive component for free
I get that you're exaggerating, and you perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "free," but the low markup the RPi guys initially paid to Broadcom does not explain as much as you think it does about the Pi's success. To explain why let's examine something else you're wrong about:
> You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price. Often, a processor vendor would explicitly provide support for these things because it was a good vector for selling chips.
Prior to the Pi you could get one board with good Linux support and a not terrible price from a vendor who provided support because they thought it was a good vector for selling chips. That was the BeagleBoard, from TI. I mean, the BB barely checked all those boxes: the support wasn't very good, it was kind of nonexistent compared to the support community the Raspberry Pi people created. But they sure didn't have to worry about the cost of the CPU.
So back to the original point: getting the CPU "for free" (since we're apparently just saying "free" now when we mean "at cost") wasn't a decisive advantage for the Raspberry Pi people, since the TI people had the same advantage. TI had a few other advantages as well, like a first mover advantage, their own assembly lines, and relationships with everyone who sells electronics components.
TI's support was crap when compared to something like RPi which deliberately targeted newbies, and as far as I remember they didn't have a few amazing people in their community dedicated to making a whole new spin of Debian and supporting it like RPi did. And, you know, PR matters. All that stuff is what made the difference.
> anticompetitive
I guess we're just throwing words around without caring what they mean today for some reason.
> I get that you're exaggerating, and you perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "free," but the low markup the RPi guys initially paid to Broadcom does not explain as much as you think it does about the Pi's success.
Broadcom sold the chips to the Raspberry Pi organization at a significant loss, not at a low markup or at cost. They were not free, but they were close to free. The TI guys never even gave anything close to "at cost" to the BeagleBoard folks.
Also, the BeagleBoard was the most hobbyist-targeted and the one with the best PR. There were, and still are, tens of companies making SBCs, but before the RPi they would all sell you singe unit quantity. Not any more. Most of them actually had better support than TI. The NXP boards in general were and still are my favorites.
Also, providing a product at a loss so that it significantly undercuts your competition (also called "dumping") is very much anticompetitive. I don't like using the term for Raspberry Pi because they clearly weren't out to create a monopoly, but the Raspberry Pi was dumping a product.
> Broadcom sold the chips to the Raspberry Pi organization at a significant loss, not at a low markup or at cost. They were not free, but they were close to free. The TI guys never even gave anything close to "at cost" to the BeagleBoard folks.
Everything in that paragraph is “citation needed,” unfortunately, but I certainly don’t mean that in a negative way. I wasn’t aware that Broadcom lost money on the early Pi parts and I feel a little skepticism about that. You seem to know something about what TI charged the Beaglebone people, I’m curious about that as well.
It’s not that dumping parts to establish a competitive advantage is beneath Broadcom - what’s beneath Broadcom? It just seems rather… prescient of them? Unless you were talking about the Pi 3 generation or something. I’d be more inclined to believe that.
On the point of PR, I don’t remember Beagleboard having anything comparable to Pi’s seemingly organic enthusiasm twelve or thirteen years ago. But I guess I’m not sure I would remember.
That’s not all meant to be some kind of RPi love letter. They were great at all that community building stuff, and in my view the best at it, but in light of the IPO it’s quite a joke.
Is there any reliable source for this? It's an interesting claim, but I'm skeptical because I don't think anyone had any idea what a huge success RPi would be. The idea that it was all a monopoly play by Broadcom is something that I'd need more evidence to believe.
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> you perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "free," but the low markup the RPi guys
You perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "markup," but citation please for /any/ "markup the RPi guys initially paid to Broadcom"
Huh. If I knew what their markup was, I would not have asked pclmulqdq for more information about what their markup was. Or what their markup wasn't, if pclmulqdq is right and Broadcom gave them the chips at a "significant loss."
> Huh. If I knew what their markup was, I would not have asked pclmulqdq for more information about what their markup was
Regardless, any basis of your "low markup" would suffice to show markup was non-zero.
...though given this is HN I would have to concede low could be zero! :)
When a product is gated behind "contact us for pricing" the chances of me, a hobbist, using it are close to zero.
Maybe there was a market of cheap and friendly to use sbc. But calling it hobbyst is an stretch.
Yes, as the article discusses, there were also the options of just using a mini-tower or SFF desktop, or a NUC/booksize PC, and often these options were comparable or less in price.
For example, I owned an ECS Liva 2/32 that I got for $100 AR and a pair of ECS Liva X 2/32 that I got for $125 each AR. These used standard N2807 and N2808 Bay Trail-D processors (Silvermont), meaning they are OoO, run standard x86 binaries and distributions, come with storage onboard (which was far more reliable than the early days of fullsize SD cards), a proper adapter, a case, and USB 3.0, for essentially the same price you paid for a Raspberry Pi 1B once you factored in all the little extras.
Obviously if you want to do GPIO and stuff, the RPi is a better option, but that also competes with micros, as mentioned. And a lot of people ended up using it for some variety of non-GPIO IOT thing attaching some USB device to wifi/ethernet, or as a NAS, etc, and the Pi was terrible at these. It had massive reliability problems (unthinkable today) and I went from incredibly excited to bouncing off it hard and learning a lesson about the right tool for the job, and I think I wasn't alone.
Part of the problem was the decision to use USB 2.0 as a system bus. Everything including network and disk all hung off a single half-duplex USB 2.0 high-speed bus. And the Rpi firmware had a bug in the USB stack which dropped frames under load, so actually this was unreliable and could lead to corruption all on its own. It took over 2 years after launch for the foundation to fix this fundamental bug in the literal system bus of their hardware (and thanks to broadcom's closed documentation/blobs, they were the only ones who could see the info to fix it).
https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19
On top of that, people forget about the non-micro-SD card slot. The fullsize slot just let the card cantilever out into space... but the thermoplastic used to make SD cards actually will soften enough from the heat of the rpi over time to warp away from the contacts and lose connection. Even just stepping up to eMMC (not the most reliable) was a massive step upwards because of how bad the Pi was at not melting its SD cards.
And the power adapter situation has always been dire - most USB chargers were utterly unable to provide consistent enough power to avoid brownouts and corruption, and (while you could PXE boot) the hardware was not even capable of PXE booting without at least a helper SD card to load from. Today, it's dire once again, with the Pi 5 drawing 5A @ 5V from the adapter, which essentially no adapter on the market is capable of delivering.
The 2B and later models (especially 4B) are enormously faster, the move to OoO cores instead of literal a single-core A57 or whatever improved performance a ton. The change to USB 3.0 (5gbps full-duplex vs 480mbps half-duplex) and getting the USB frame drop bug fixed helped a ton (the pi couldn't even serve a usb hard drive at full speed). And the 4B moved to armv8 which has a drastically clearer standard for binaries than the armv7 situation, which was an utter mess at the start (softfp binaries were a thing for a bit with the early 1B releases iirc!). Admittedly Pi was better than any other arm device but the Liva just ran debian or ubuntu.
I actually think it was an utter failure as a product. I cannot imagine having to maintain a whole computer lab of these things melting (softening+warping) the SD cards, can't even PXE boot unassisted, can't get good adapters? Let alone the situation with firmware problems/driver quality and needing (at the time) weird binaries with a non-standardized bootloader etc. Why would you buy that instead of the Liva X for the same finished price?
The pivot to "these are for makers!" was a pivot, and then they pivoted again into commercial. Like good for them but it's always been a messy product with an uncertain target market.
It was always borne largely on the backs of enthusiasts shoving it into various home-server and IOT usage, most of which didn't actually need a GPIO. And the GPIO thing was always better served by the ESP8266 in most situations, and that ecosystem really matured almost in parallel with the Rpi. So sure, while the Pi got more suitable for actual GPIO hobbyism over time, so did everything else too. I regard the whole thing as fundamentally having been overhyped and a waste of time by people who (in most circumstances) really should just have bought a booksize or an off-lease OEM USFF desktop.
That was me. Got an old Core2Duo desktop for $10 at a surplus sale, that became the fileserver I was trying to build, which instantly ended the reliability struggle I'd been having (rpi lasted an average of 1-2 months MTBF in my homeserver usage) then I got a couple booksize and nettops and ended up with NUCs etc which are just a far better fit for what I'm trying to do.
To each their own, but again, I think really very few people are interested in them for the GPIO stuff, it's the "$35 for a little computer" thing that draws people in, but that's an impedence mismatch to expectations, that's not why you should buy a rpi/if that's your use-case then there are better options.
It's late and you may never see this but I do appreciate this post. It also reflects my own experience. The Pi2 still awful (I never encountered the first version) and I eventually put it in the electronics recycling bin.
I also like your perspective on the bigger picture here.