This looked pretty cool until I found a price: ~$100.
Lots of cool features, and it's a beagleboard, so there will be actual support/documentation/source. But I'm not sure $100 is "affordable" for the SoC you get and the small 2GB of RAM.
Lots of cool features, and it's a beagleboard, so there will be actual support/documentation/source. But I'm not sure $100 is "affordable" for the SoC you get and the small 2GB of RAM.
The price is exactly where it belongs without Broadcom subsidizing things so they can be given away.
Of course, since Broadcom is no longer subsidizing things, mere mortals can't get an RPi anymore.
But, don't worry, Broadcom is happy to give them to companies like T-Mobile now that all the suckers^W users created an ecosystem for them.
A bazillion mobile phones with similar cpus, ram, AND screen, cameras and other sensors, battery, bla bla bla aren't being subsidized. Lots of them are at similar price levels.
The Cortex-A CPUs can access more than 2GB but because that memory requires more than 32 bit addressing, the other processors cannot easily access it.
This is a common theme in similar TI SOCs. For example, the AM57xx SOC which are used on the Beagle-X15 and Beagle-AI can have more memory available to the Cortex-A15 than can be possibly made available to the DSP and Cortex-M4 processors. The Cortex-A15 has a special interface to the memory controller which enables extended address use beyond 32 bits where-as the other processors and subsystems within the SOC are all attached to a bus where 32 bit addresses are the maximum.
What's preventing the 32-bit CPUs from accessing the full 4 GB of a 32-bit address space?
Additional memory beyond 2GB are all located above 0x1_0000_0000 address.
TI actually had BeagleBoard (not BeagleBone) and PandaBoard for OMAP long before RPI came along. Those were nice, but still were close to $200. Probably $300 in today's dollars.
Someone later produced a cheaper Blackfin dev board called the “STAMP” and sold it for ~$100ish and worked to support uCLinux and a GCC backend. Picked one of those up and did a bunch of hacking in my own time, really fun stuff.
And back in those days if you were a high volume customer you got all the development tools for nothing. But that didn't help startups and tinkerers at all. Hacking hardware in the early days was not easy.
This TI AM625 is around $18 in high quantity. When you add in all the connectors and DRAM and the PCB/assembly it sure looks like a $100 retail cost is almost selling it for no profit.
I can fit a home server with some to spare to 512MB.