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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I believe their biggest failure in branding is to not put out Raspberry Pi-like small boards for people to experiment. Anyone with a slight interest in computers knows an M3 is a beast and that an i3 is meh. Almost nobody outside Qualcomm knows why a Gen 8 N is better than an 800 and what the difference would be.

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There's economic reasons behind the cheap SoCs you see. Invariably it's when an SoC was made in bulk expecting some market that never materialized.

For instance the original Pi SoC was very clearly intended for some set top box OEM that didn't pick it up for some reason.

When that happens, after a while the chip manufacturer is willing to sell them for way below cost just to get anything back from their inventory that from their perspective looks like a complete loss.

So you get an industrious cottage industry that takes those to cheap to make sense chips, cost reduces the reference design, and ships them with the just barely building sdk from the chip manufacturer.

At the end of the day Qualcomm doesn't care about this market because they are pretty good about keeping their customers on the hook for their bulk orders. So they're focused on supporting current bulk customers where a $1k dev board is actually a really reasonable price.

They do in fact put those out. That said the pricing is not at all Pi like. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 board goes for north of a thousand dollars.

https://www.lantronix.com/products/snapdragon-8-gen-2-mobile...

That's only Pi-like in the sense of being an SBC, unlike the Pi it's meant to be an evaluation/reference platform for integrators who want to build their own board around the SOC, not something you would buy to use for its own sake.

And this is where they fail - the people who gets their boards have almost zero interest in upstreaming whatever hardware enablement they do to make the boards sort of work for their specific use cases.

I really don't think undercutting their evaluation board business with affordable SBCs would hurt their bottom line.

The people who buy those eval boards probably aren't even allowed to upstream whatever they do with it, they'll have signed an NDA with Qualcomm to get access to the documentation.

But maybe they could make it more Pi-like, that is pricing it so that it can interest both integrators and hobbyists, with a bootloader that makes it easy to tinker with the OS (not necessarily the firmware).

I am sure that if the RPi Foundation can do it, Qualcomm can as well.

Broadcom is the counterpart to Qualcomm in that comparison, and those two have similar attitudes towards the hobbyist/enthusiast market - they don't care in the slightest. It took a entity outside of Broadcom which nonetheless had deep connections to them (Eben Upton was there prior to starting RPi) in order to broker a compromise where the Pi could happen, and even then Broadcom kept most of the documentation tied up in NDAs and the bare SOCs not available for sale to the general public.

The Raspberry Pi is an anomaly that's unlikely to be replicated.

That's a good point. Perhaps even something like the NUC form-factor would work well.

The soc alone is 160+ dollars.

I didn't say the SBC needs to be ridiculously cheap as well, just to be competitive with others.

Intel Core i3 is to Apple M3, i5 is to M3 Pro, i7 is to M3 Max, and i9 is to M3 Ultra.

If you think an i3 is "meh", you know nothing about computers. For the vast majority of users including gamers, an i3 is overkill.

I don't know which benchmarks you are using, but if you look at something like this:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html

you can see there is no i3 outperforming a base M3 and while some i7's and i9's (and Ryzen's) outperform even the top M3, it's only so because of core-count (at the expense of increased TDP and shorter battery life).

I'm talking about their tiers as merchandise. i3 is to Ryzen 3 is to M* (eg: M1, M2, etc.). They are all the lowest tier of their respective premium class of merchandise.

And regardless of benchmarks, an i3 will overkill any workload the average man will ask of it. You do realize an i3 has 4 hyperthreaded cores these days?

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