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I thought that the CPU in the original Raspberry Pi was designed for set top boxes not mobile phones.

I also recall that it was actually primarily a GPU chip which had an ARM core originally intended as a driver for the GPU (and not really intended as a primary processor). And they were leftovers from larger volume chip runs.

The BCM2835 was originally a high volume shipping cell phone GPU for Nokia with a different part number (BCM2708) and the ARM core enabled internally. It was also stacked with DDR memory.

It shipped first in a STB for Roku, but that was happenstance vs any design intention.

The market for separate cell phone GPUs died off, but the die was manufactured still for the RPi.

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