liz_upton

Yes, you're wrong. We don't get a subsidy or any other special treatment from Broadcom; they are helping us in allowing us to purchase chips in much smaller numbers than they'd usually consider, though. They're also very happy for their engineers to volunteer on the project (we have four or five who chip in) - outside work hours.

We'll definitely be shipping, and it'll definitely be at the price we've been talking about all along. At the moment we're waiting for the factory to send the finished units back to us (things slowed down for Chinese New Year); we don't have a definite date from them yet, but I'd expect us to be shipping in the next 2-3 weeks.

I work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and I can assure you that the chip exists. If you do a bit more googling, you'll find it's in already out there in the millions in other devices - the Roku set top box, for example.

That thread you linked to is from early on in the summer, before we had finished negotiations with our vendors and had documentation in place that allowed us to say that the SoC we are using is the BCM2835. If you search for BCM2835 on our website, you'll see that since then there's a lot of discussion about it with the name there in full.

We're all on track to have the first units out by the end of the year (which will be auctioned) and to be producing them in large numbers in January - there's not much more I can say to dampen your speculation, so I guess you'll just have to wait so you can watch us pull it off.

The Raspberry Pi foundation is not Broadcom - we're having a hell of a time getting that message out. We're an independent charity.

Our director does work for Broadcom, which meant that we were able to get a foot in the door to discuss buying chips from them in much smaller numbers than they're usually prepared to sell people (their normal sales to a single customer are in the tens of millions range) once we'd explained the aims of the charity. They did allow to use their parts library to make the alpha boards which you can see in the video. Outside that, we're not receiving any other help from them (we source all our own parts for the final boards). All of us have day jobs and are doing all our Raspberry Pi work on a volunteer basis because we believe it's a project that can make a real difference. (I'm volunteering full-time - I'm freelance, so I've been able to put other work aside for at least the rest of the year.)

We're not selling at a loss. This isn't a Broadcom marketing exercise. Our relationship with Broadcom is one of customer/supplier - and that's it.

It is full 1080p, but that clip doesn't have content to the edge of the video frame, so you're seeing black bars at either side (which we are decoding, for what it matters!)

It's a cine clip, so I think it was 24fps. We can decode 30fps, but it's actually quite hard to find content!

We're selling too close to cost to make any discounts workable, but we can discount on shipping if people buy lots in one go.

We're definitely not done with optimisation, which is why we're not launching right-now-this-minute. You'll be seeing improvements, which we'll be blogging about (we think development's fascinating, and that it's good for people to have a glimpse about what's involved with putting this sort of thing together) all the way up until we launch.

The article doesn't mention the HDMI sound, which was always high quality. The upgraded audio is from the 3.5mm jack, which means you can now run two high-quality streams at once - something that some people have been requesting.

We definitely can. Our BOM comes in well under the planned selling price, and we're totally confident of hitting the $25/$35 price points.

Hi - I'm Liz from Raspberry Pi. What you can see in that vid isn't the whole of Inglorious Basterds, but just the trailer (which is why it fits on a small SD card) - we were playing it on a loop. The Raspberry Pi can play back full 25 megabit HDMI; it's part of our mobile phone SoC dividend.