"In future we’ll have to do something, but for Pi 5 we feel the hardware encode is a mm^2 too far."
is corporate speech for "broadcom decided not to let us use their video IP cores for low cost/no cost any longer"
is corporate speech for "broadcom decided not to let us use their video IP cores for low cost/no cost any longer"
But dropping the hardware h.264 decoder is a horrible thing to do. H.264 might as well be the lingua franca of online videos. Think of all the kids in classrooms loading videos on Youtube now constantly hammering the CPU for decode. It's such a weird decision that it can only be caused by business issues.
Broadcom is one of the few options out there for ARM SoC. Rpi could dump a bunch of money into making their own SoC, but that would really ballon the costs.
Too bad it's because of the former broadcom employees within the foundation.
In reality being a single big customer for one vendor is far more influential than being a small one with other options.
In what world? the one where firms don't compete?
If other firms are explicitly on the table for the currently negotiated and next generation RPi, Broadcom will have more incentive to meet the RPi Foundation's specific needs. If Broadcom knows that RPi is not talking to other vendors, then their negotiating position is stronger.
This is 100% a natural consequence of the need to make your quarter. A bigger deal is much more influential than a small one, consistently. Sales incentives also do this.
People who have not actually worked in the industry with a solid eye for how this works often think that having multiple vendors is a good answer, but it’s not. Having optionality helps, but in the end it’s all about deal size.
lol, are you unaware of how qualcomm treats all of it's customers, including megacorps?
If so, Raspberry Pi has an organizational culture of outright lying, as opposed to simply speaking plainly. I know this is not Eben Upton speaking, but I've found him many times in the past being either evasive with the truth, or simply lying. It's one thing to not step of the toes of partners, or to not Osborne a product by suggesting a successor is nearing, but to be outright dishonest. Yuck.
This is very, very disappointing.
I don't think that is what they are saying, and I haven't seen any evidence of that. It makes the most sense to me that either (as GP said) they got rid of the H264 hardware to save on paying Broadcom for the rights to include that hardware block in the chip, or to save on the die area they take up (as RPi said), or both.