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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

The situation for hobbyists getting SoCs is terrible - I've got a MiiPC at home that won't be getting much use because Marvell won't release any documentation on it without an NDA

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NDAs are firmly integrated in the embedded industry. If you could get your hands on any other SoC, you would need to sign an NDA as well. For example Tegra documentation needs an NDA too.

Freescale and TI tend to be good about providing heaps of documentation without requiring any NDA.

Unfortunately, they're pretty alone in that regard.

I tend to think the only reason TI and Freescale have good documentation is because they've been in the market a lot longer than the others and have had time to mature the work. TI had early wins with Nokia and Freescale has been in the automotive market and had some early multimedia work like the Toshiba Gigabeat (aka Zune 1).

Providing a complete doc set for these chips runs well above 10,000 pages. I recently got to evaluate a Marvell chipset and...um...let's say it wasn't pretty.

Check out ACME systems - they're doing a good job of addressing this problem: http://www.acmesystems.it/

Nice but it's all ARM9 based, so nothing at the high end as far I could see in that page.

Which is why it drives me nuts when people refer to the Raspberry Pi as "open hardware". You can't get even close to the datasheet without an NDA.

It's open-er than say, the UDOO or Cubieboard. One of the things that the Pi has is an extremely large and active community - this helps with things like reverse engineering efforts.

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