Blitz-scaling LLM for fictional future revenue assumes competing technology will remain immutable. It is a false premise with dire consequences for the credulous.
China is already filling the vacuum within the flash/ddr/cpu/gpu market, and quality/speed will rapidly improve with domestic use. We are already seeing blank label storage clones emerging in international markets. =3
Even at 10€ it was tantalizing. Please, give us something in that price range.
A few years ago we could get our hands on a Orange Pi Zero, with wifi, Ethernet, and 512MB of RAM, for less than $10. I think I bought mine for slightly over $5.
Now they sell for a tad over $30. What a shame.
We now have the ESP32 line of microcontrollers. That should scratch some of the itches.
While people do often use pis to do things you could do with an esp32, an ESP32 cannot do the majority of things a Pi can do.
Personally I use ESP32s for GPIO to control things around the house and have one Raspberry Pi acting as a hub.
In some of the tinkering applications, RPis are shoehorned into the very operarional model that is followed by ESP32s.
ESP32s may be harder to debug but they allow us to remove a big chunk of the complexity that lies between our code and what we want the device to do.
I think your criticism is more in line with "they are not exactly the same as RPis". And that is fine.
A pi zero is to play with, an esp32 is so tiny, that it is more of a build for a single thing, and then set it and forget it doing that single thing.
You cant really stack more and more cool stuff onto it and keep building on it.
Frustratingly, many other SoMs and SBCs use this chip. I don't understand why there is no recall on this - in my opinion - trash product. It's an odd feeling to be the only one experiencing this. I am 100% confident this is a design flaw in the CYW43455. I've seen this also on a Pine64 CM4 compatible SoM, which has a completely different SoC. This is on both the official and custom carrier. Cypress, fix your shit!
Amazingly powerful hardware for the price these little things.
Just use a USB adapter with a decent antenna.
Or literally any $1-3 SPDT RF switch? >80% of which are directly optimized and advertised for wifi and bluetooth?
https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C47117600.html
Here's a capable switch for $0.07.
I do like the Pico series and it would be cool to have one of those with memory protection.
They stopped making the lpddr2 dram that the old SoCs used a few years back, and now most of the stock has dried up.
The Pi 4 SoC used lpddr4, and I’m pretty sure they are still making it.
If not for the success of Raspberry Pi, Broadcom would have zero SBC presence today. Like many companies chasing the high volumes and high margins, they don't see the market value in a segment like this. Thus things like poor docs and weird blobs. Raspberry Pi is open to the degree it is despite Broadcom, not because of it.
Ironically, that Broadcom tie could have caused RPi to eventually lose ground to other SBCs - because the likes of Rockchip just deliver more bang for buck in SoC dept. Broadcom doesn't seem to be investing in staying competitive in the segment. So RPi's edge is just the ecosystem being more important than raw price/performance.
For now though, that's pretty much on hold, because SBC price tags are increasingly DRAM dominated instead.
I myself am guilty as hell of this, of carrying my own remixed software, juggling patches atop upstream, and feeling like getting it upstream would be far more work and labor (and ultimately like I don't really have the confidence to assert to upstream). Meanwhile upstream is screaming their heads off everywhere that they can't take it anymore, that they are not ok. It sucks that we have such amazing power, such competency, but our scaling & social functions aren't scaling into the godlike powers that are now on tap! Alas.
Pine's Quartz64 has different peripherals attached but still afaik one of the best ways to track upstream support. It hasn't changed much since Linux 6.1 and I don't know if that's because there's nothing new or the page is just out of date. https://pine64.org/documentation/Quartz64/Development/
Having at least 1x1 802.11ac that's capable of working in the 5050 to 5900 MHz band will be a huge feature improvement. Such as to connect to a 'modern' AP running in an 80 MHz channel.
There's tons of environments where 2.4 GHz is a CSMA hell of noise and the performance in a single 20 MHz channel will always be crap, and ranges/real world distances between AP and pi will be very limited because of the extreme noise in the 2.4 band.
It's one of the few products I look at with awe and which makes me feel good about the tech industry.
I managed to build a WiFi temperature sensor (which can be substituted with any analog sensor) which streams its data to a web platform (I also built), encrypted over HTTPS (with CA certificate verification), using a $10 Raspberry PI Pico W; built in a single weekend. I can connect it to my phone's WiFi hotspot from anywhere and stream data to my web platform where it displays a realtime chart. $10.
The Pi5 is even slower than N100 cpu, which is low power mobile laptop cpu.
I remember programming ATMEL ATMEGA8s and being amazed as how much I could do with them, so to me, the fact that devices of that size can approach even half the clock speed of a cutting-edge computer, and have multiple cores, is mind-blowing.
Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-zero-3-w-pi-4-model-a/