$25 PC priced like a textbook, works with old analog TVs

Looking at Broadcom's part numbers, it's not a "current" product but it seems to fit in the same series of numbers as their 3G baseband processors and mobile multimedia processors.

I get the feeling it's a new mobile multimedia processor (judging by the HDMI+ARM+3d graphics supprot) which is being conveniently repurposed.

I reckon it'll be on the market soon enough but don't expect to be able to get anything out of Broadcom unless you want volume. Even Farnell don't carry their parts.

Not just an employee, but an associate technical director at Broadcom. Others have found that the Raspberry Pi blog posts and etc are coming from Broadcom addresses. They're doing this on company time.

Earlier I thought this was a good marketing thing. Other companies like TI are doing this to get chips in the hands of hackers and spread some goodwill towards future commercial users of their chips.

But, as others have noted, Broadcom is a lot more standoffish with individuals that want access to sample parts and datasheets. So what is Broadcom gaining here? Inroads into educational markets? Access to open-source code written by tinkerers that they can incorporate into future EVKs and chipsets?

Maybe this odd part # is just a series of chips that have failed speedbinning and are being sold off cheaply?

I suspect $25 for a textbook is more common in non-Western countries, which would likely be a great market for these things as well.

I think the comparison is supposed to be with high / secondary school textbooks, which are cheaper than university ones. Raspberry Pi is a charity "to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level" and the device is aimed, in part at least, for use in teaching programming to children.[1]

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=2

The $25 textbook reference is based on children at school, not young adults in universities. I don't know about America, but in England $25 is a pretty good estimate for textbooks used by 8-18 year olds.

I think both the analog port and the hdmi port are available on both versions (model A and model B, shades of the BBC micro). THe only difference between the 2 is the amount of RAM (128 vs 256) and the IO (1 USB vs 2USB + Ethernet). Be aware that the B's 2 USB + ETHERNET are internally connected to the Broadcom's single USB port though... you're not adding bandwidth, just ports.

what sort of "hack real hardware" do you want to do?

The OLPC XO-1 was designed for third-world markets: the only way you could acquire one in the US (and possibly other countries?) was by paying $200, which both got you one and sponsored one for a third-world child. (My cousins actually have one, so I know they exist.) They stopped this deal a year or two ago, though.

The India PC was never $10 outright, IIRC: it was $10 after some rather massive subsidies.

The Raspberry Pi literally went into alpha production a week ago, and software support is in its very early stages. Expecting to be able to buy it right now is a little silly.

I have an OLPC XO-1, I used it every week. It is my favorite laptop. I have very good net access with it and use this little gem for my server maintenance needs... cool little thing. If OLPC would do another give-1-get-1, I would pick three.

Now, I want do a little bulk order of Raspberry Pis when they are available and see what I can do with them for my community.

About the downvotes, you COULD buy an OLPC for $200 during the give 1 get 1 phase. I got mine, if you were truly interested in these projects, you would knew that. You're just a flamer...

I suspect you're right in that the $25 is probably just a BOM cost (and an optimistic one at that). Once you actually try to get it built and delivered into someones hands, especially in small batches, I'm sure that $25 could ballon 2-5x easily.

The $100 Laptop could have been done, but OLPC and the buyer countries agreed that it was better to add more memory and storage, and use a faster processor. Also, the dollar was falling during the design phase. So the actual production cost came to $188, and the price to governments in quantity 10K was $189. More than 2 million have been sold, delivered, and put into the hands of students all over the world. (Later designs cost less, and we have every confidence in reaching the $100 price point due to the inexorable working of Moore's Law.) You can buy one on eBay for about $150. I own two, which I have named thing1 and thing2.

The $10 PC from India was a publicity stunt, not a PC, and never went into production.

The Raspberry Pi is $25, needing in addition a keyboard, display, external storage, and networking. That should come to about $150-$200. These guys just now announced the first engineering test build, and you complain that they didn't go into production yesterday.

"Please check your facts before posting nonsense to the Internet."--Beable van Polasm, alt.religion.kibology

Used on amazon.

The same place you get 50 cent antibiotics and $1 DVDs. If you are in the US, UK, CA, or western europe no need to apply. The publishers have decided you can pay more and will charge you thusly.

Or try to get one of the international students to give you theirs. Makes you laugh internally to know you spent $100s of dollars on engineering textbooks while the internationally student sitting next to you has the same one in paperback and probably paid $10 for it. And that's if their government scholarship doesn't include the book stipend.

At places selling textbooks to schools, not to university students.

While the 25$ model certainly costs them, the 35$ one may not. Plus, if they have massive commands, they may be able to invoke some economy of scale.