Raspberry Pi Receives Strategic Investment from Sony Semiconductor Solutions
sony.co.uk
sony.co.uk
"Sony backs Raspberry Pi with fresh funding, access to A.I. chips"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35536303 (115 points | 6 days ago | 91 comments)
Me neither.
The profit side deals with actually selling pi’s and feeds its profits into the nonprofit.
I am hopeful somebody knows how Raspberry Pi is structured and can elaborate.
Plus, that really, really helps with getting broad community support off the ground. Making my solution the community solution of choice is extremely valuable.
In part because 5 is the perfect number for this, but mostly because it would mean that the foundation has already lost touch with reality and the direction the industry is going, and is drifting into irrelevance.
SBCs that are compliant with RISC-V specs, have good driver upstreaming efforts and are highly competitive with the Raspberry Pi series such as the VisionFive 2 and Star64 have already hit the market.
They aren't as fast as the rpi4 in the CPU side, but the CPU is still faster than the 3b+'s and everything else in the SoC including the GPU is much better, with higher power efficiency and using standard usb-pd power supplies. Nevermind the fact they use standard RISC-V boot process rather than bespoke garbage.
Whereas the Sipeed LM4A TBA this month has a RISC-V CPU that is significantly faster than the one in rpi4 and 400 and is still competitively priced with options under $100.
"standard RISC-V boot process rather than bespoke garbage"
AKA It has UEFI. You can get UEFI on a Raspberry Pi as well with TianoCore, even if it isn't quite as complete and requires Pi-specific because ARM is a mess. However, ARM has a specification for that, SystemReady, which is slowly rolling out. If the Raspberry Pi 5 were SystemReady compliant at a higher level (one can dream), then we could have unified images just like a PC.
Also, be careful what you wish for. RISC-V, despite all the hype, is just an instruction set. UEFI compatibility is optional. Open-source drivers are optional. Not having Secure Boot is optional. If you want to add your own proprietary instructions, you can do so. Apple could remake their own M1 with RISC-V while having the drivers and firmware support be just as complicated as with ARM and not one ounce simpler. Heck, Apple could switch the iPhone's next chip out with RISC-V and still keep their App Store monopoly and iOS-only boot process intact.
"standard usb-pd power supplies"
The Raspberry Pi 4 fixed that problem in an unannounced hardware revision years ago. Revision 1.2 in 2020.
"competitively priced with options under $100"
AKA 3 times as expensive as they need to be. Not good enough. It's hard enough for kids to fork over $35, let alone $90. By $90 it's a completely different product for a completely different market.
The 2 additional CPU cores throw me off. I don't know what chip you're talking about there.
>Not just because RISC-V's CPU is still not all there (but could be in another generation or two),
If you're thinking performance, Ventana's Veyron should be available in 2023H2 in server form.
While we don't know how competitive that will be, there's also Tenstorrent Ascalon (Jim Keller's team). That's releasing next year (2024), with performance competitive with (projected) Zen5.
There's no gap left to close at that point.
Of course, if the target is just a "Pi 4", the LM4A that's releasing the present month does already significantly outperform it.
Whereas the already available VisionFive2 (JH7110 SoC) lands somewhere between Raspberry Pi 3b+ and 4b CPU performance, with a GPU that's some 4x the throughput, and much faster RAM and I/O.
>The Raspberry Pi 4 fixed that problem in an unannounced hardware revision years ago. Revision 1.2 in 2020.
AIUI, what they fixed is a spec violation. They still require 5v at very high current.
This is e.g. in contrast to the VisionFive2, which will take any usb-pd phone charger and will negotiate 12v, yet will also work with one of these 5v rpi supplies.
>Also, be careful what you wish for. RISC-V, despite all the hype, is just an instruction set.
A high-quality RISC ISA you don't need to pay a license to use, and which has put serious efforts in having high-quality boot and platform specs in place before significant hardware availability.
>AKA 3 times as expensive as they need to be. Not good enough.
I get the feeling you have not looked at availability and pricing of Raspberry Pi products recently.
Where recently is quite generous.