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The VC4 GPU is a lot worse than microcode! It's running the complete (proprietary) ThreadX operating system, regardless of what you choose to run on the ARM core.

You meant VPU, not GPU? The GPU is fully open.

Yes, I called the VC4 the GPU because the parent post (and many other resources) call it a GPU. But yes, it is the VPU.

Indeed, Broadcom doesn't even allow you to buy their proprietary SoC (at least, last I checked), so you can't make a knock off RPi board, or integrate the SoC and peripherals into a custom application board. You need to use an RPi directly or get some other Cortex-A53 chip with a comparable architecture.

Open source hardware refers to both the system level design and the IC level design. Credit where it's due, Raspberry PI is open hardware on the system level. You are right that it is not open on the IC level.

Nonsense. It's not open at any level by normal definitions (although some of the software is open source). The Raspberry Pi is a wonderful thing. It's cheap and it works great...but it's not open.