Interesting to see a Broadcom logo and chip markings visible on the CPU now.
Love 'em or hate 'em, I suspect Broadcom are very happy about this as those chip markings are prime marketing real estate.
Considering the phenomenal success of the previous Raspberry Pi units this probably formed part of the negotiations for the CPU price.
There are of course other considerations such as trace lengths and availability of packages for both the CPU and LPDDR2 but that logo being directly in the hands of the engineers of tomorrow makes a big difference.
The previous models used a PoP (Package-on-Package) stack of the CPU and SDRAM and now they've moved to discrete SoC and DDR2 packages (with the DDR2 chip now on the underside of the PCB).
They are making their own silicon (see the RP1 at [1]) and obviously have very significant input as to what Broadcom puts into the main SoC, a chip that is primarily now made for RPi needs.
Looking at Broadcom's part numbers, it's not a "current" product but it seems to fit in the same series of numbers as their 3G baseband processors and mobile multimedia processors.
I get the feeling it's a new mobile multimedia processor (judging by the HDMI+ARM+3d graphics supprot) which is being conveniently repurposed.
I reckon it'll be on the market soon enough but don't expect to be able to get anything out of Broadcom unless you want volume. Even Farnell don't carry their parts.
If an aspect of this is hackability, I'm wondering if a schematic or a datasheet for the CPU will be released. Under "schematic", in the wiki right now I see a pcb "gerber" layout, and Broadcom isn't one of the more open companies with datasheets. But, I figure they're in a pre-shipping crunch right now, so we'll all wait and see...
Why would Broadcom sue a large customer like Google? Check out what chips are in the motherboard picture in Wired's article from a few years ago about the Pluto switch.
It's a BCM2711, and the datasheet is NDA only - typical Broadcom!
The VideoCore (Broadcoms GPU) is the main processor on the thing, and the cluster of ARM cores that run Linux are more of a coprocessor which can only see some of RAM.
The way the presentation keeps mentioning IP makes me think that the chips are just a demo and they want to license the IP to be embedded in someone's SoC.
Is it truly amazing? I was under impression that Raspberry requires some blobs to run properly. Is there detailed specifications for Broadcom chip they're using? I was under impression that it was NDA and not possible to obtain for ordinary mortal. So may be it's good because of sheer number of people tinkering with it and smoothing rough edges, but it could be better. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Interesting that Texas Instruments Raspberry (you know, TI is to BeagleBoard as Broadcom is to RPi) would use a 3rd party SoC. I guess it still uses a AM335x internally so it's a tossup for them.
Would have wished they had updated the AM335x to one of the beefier Sitaras, they are falling somewhat behind if only in clock rate.
Please avoid code snippets for blockquotes. It's very annoying to read this with the `overflow-x: scroll` that HN's CSS adds (particularly on mobile). Just put a ">" in front of the paragraph, like so:
> We expect the Raspberry Pi 4 to be based on a new Broadcom SoC based on Cortex-A55 built on < 28nm fabrication process. We can call this BCM2839 and it will feature the much alluded to VC5 GPU and a new form factor. Since that hardware is more than two years away, it is difficult to predict the direction of the industry and thus the exact specifications. We expect such a Raspberry Pi 4 board to utilize dual 32-bit LPDDR3 or LPDDR4 to cope with the bandwidth requirements of OpenCL and neural network acceleration. The exact release date for such a specimen can vary dramatically depending on Broadcom’s tapeout schedule. It should be relatively soon if the Raspberry Pi Foundation expects to release hardware in 2019.
Love 'em or hate 'em, I suspect Broadcom are very happy about this as those chip markings are prime marketing real estate.
Considering the phenomenal success of the previous Raspberry Pi units this probably formed part of the negotiations for the CPU price.
There are of course other considerations such as trace lengths and availability of packages for both the CPU and LPDDR2 but that logo being directly in the hands of the engineers of tomorrow makes a big difference.
The previous models used a PoP (Package-on-Package) stack of the CPU and SDRAM and now they've moved to discrete SoC and DDR2 packages (with the DDR2 chip now on the underside of the PCB).
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