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Hardware

Arm Acquires Minority Stake in Raspberry Pi (tomshardware.com) 37

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Arm today announced that it has made a strategic investment, a minority stake in Raspberry Pi -- the arm of Raspberry Pi responsible for the new Raspberry Pi 5 and past Raspberry Pi products. From a report: Arm's minority stake extends the long-term partnership between Arm and Raspberry Pi, which has seen Arm CPUs feature in all of the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico SoC. The partnership began way before the Raspberry Pi was available for sale, in 2008 -- when the original board was still just a dream. Fast-forward to 2023 and we have a generation of learners who have taken their first steps with coding, science and electronics thanks to the Raspberry Pi.
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Arm Acquires Minority Stake in Raspberry Pi More

Arm Acquires Minority Stake in Raspberry Pi

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  • Learners (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Last time I tried to get one it proved difficult. Stock was thin. Is this because raspberry pi courts industrial buyers? If so I'm worried that such a fragile system is being embedded in who-knows-where.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shakrai ( 717556 )

      Last time I tried to get one it proved difficult. Stock was thin. Is this because raspberry pi courts industrial buyers?

      I don't think they "court" industrial buyers, in fact, they limited purchases of the new unit to try and keep such buyers from snapping up all available inventory.

      If so I'm worried that such a fragile system is being embedded in who-knows-where.

      You should be. It's a great little platform but it was never intended as a replacement for mission critical stuff. It's also kind of shitty IMHO to buy large numbers of them for that role when the mission statement was to bring affordable computing to the masses. It triggers me as badly as the crypto bros buying masses of GPUs and driving up t

      • er (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Unless "last time" he tried to buy one was within the last month, yes, the reason stock was thin was that stock was going to industrial buyers. For whatever reason they've cultivated such a large industrial demand and now they are stuck with those customers -- too much volume to afford to lose them. To keep those customers they need to be the highest priority. For the 5 they are giving individual buyers priority for the first three months ... golly, so generous. That said the resellers are not giving people

  • We are coming up on four years since the start of the pandemic when disrupted supply chains and soaring hobbyist interest (stuck in lock down) made Raspberry Pis either completely unavailable, or only available in limited configurations at prices several times higher that list thus making the idea of a "low cost computing device" a fantasy. And a full three years later (March of this year) that was still the case.

    Just checking the five approved retailers linked to the Raspberry Pi site to see if the curren

    • Plenty of clone boards are out there. Even some using RISC-V but with the same pinout and form factor as the Pi nano.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nickovs ( 115935 )

      Just checking the five approved retailers linked to the Raspberry Pi site to see if the current model bare bones with 4 GB RAM were available (base price now $60) only two of them claimed to have any (one per customer limit) the others had none and could give a date for availability.

      Supply of the new Pi5 is still very tight, since they are only just ramping up production. I just checked three US-based retailers (SparkFun [sparkfun.com], Vilros [vilros.com] and PiShos.us [pishop.us]; all three of them had 4GB Pi4 board in stock and only one limited the number, with a maximum of 5 per customer.

    • Been able to buy 4s at MSRP at retail at the Microcenter by me for a while now, their stock fluctuates but itâ(TM)s been pretty reliable recently, and they *always* have zeros The 5s just came out, gonna take a while for stock to stabilize there

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Revek ( 133289 )
      In stock today at different places rpilocator.com filter (us)

  • Maybe we can get back to cheap single board computers again

  • Without desktop apps being compiled on ARM Pis, Apple may not have had so many compilers and expertise to make the ARM switch on Macs. Before the Pi, Arm on the desktop was mostly the remains of the old Acorn business that was mostly nostalgia.
    • On the desktop side youâ(TM)re right, but even on general computing ARM was hardly just âoethe remains of Acornâ when the Pi came out, they powered basically every smartphone out there, still do

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      >Without desktop apps being compiled on ARM Pis, Apple may not have had so many compilers and expertise to make the ARM switch on Macs
      Buddy, Apple worked on LLVM since 2005 and it's an integral part of XCode which is for iOS apps.
      I think they know a thing or two about compiling for ARM processors.

    • Re:Raspberry Pi brought ARM back to the desktop (Score:5, Insightful)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Thursday November 02, 2023 @02:31PM (#63974812)
      Um what? Apple has compiled OS code on ARM since the original iPhone. I am pretty sure that Raspberry Pi existing does not remove any obstacles for Apple. Considering one of OSS projects Apple has supported for almost 20 years is LLVM, Apple has done a lot of work on their own for the x86 to ARM transition. From the speculation I have heard, Apple has been preparing since Skylake (2015) to move off Intel as the QA was particularly bad.

    • Re:Raspberry Pi brought ARM back to the desktop (Score:5, Informative)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Thursday November 02, 2023 @02:49PM (#63974886) Homepage Journal

      Without desktop apps being compiled on ARM Pis, Apple may not have had so many compilers and expertise to make the ARM switch on Macs.

      Uh, no.

      ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) was developed for use by Acorn computer in their computers. The project was a joint venture between Acorn (effecively defunct), Apple, and VLSI Technology (now part of NXP Semiconductors), and 30% of ARM was originally held by Apple. You literally can't find a company with a longer history of working with ARM than Apple, because they were involved from basically day one, and other than a chip manufacturer, they're the only company who can claim that.

      By the time Raspberry Pi came out in 2012, Apple had been using ARM chips for five years in the iPhone. The compiler that Apple uses, clang, was originally written by Apple, and Apple was a major contributor to llvm starting in 2005, a full seven years before Raspberry Pi came on the scene.

      So no, Raspberry Pi most assuredly did not contribute any compilers or expertise that made the Mac transition to ARM easier. Apple was solidly on that path long ago.

  • A terrible investment. I would rather set a million dollars on fire and keep myself warm at night.

    • The investment is to ensure they continue using ARM cpus, and to guide them into irrelevancy. I'm quite certain they are not expecting any monetary return on this investment.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ukoda ( 537183 )
        Yes, this is probably a important point with RISC-V seeing a big uptake as it matures and companies worry about controls on ARM IP. RISC-V would be worth the RPi foundation consideration for future models, so ARM investing in them would be a way to reduce the risk of RISC-V, if you will excuse the pun.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        I doubt that's much of a factor. Raspberry Pi is unlikely to move away from Broadcom SOCs. Unless, now that ARM owns part of them, they become more interested in designing their own, following on from the pico.

  • It says right on its web page that it's a charitable foundation. Then the article talks about a plc - uh, when and how did this happen? This is not right.

  • No to Risc-V (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blowdog ( 993153 ) on Thursday November 02, 2023 @02:00PM (#63974720)

    Worried about a Risc-V Pi

  • Arm has an arm in Raspberry Pi?

    Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nickovs ( 115935 )

      Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

      True, but sadly Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo too, and so the cycle of abuse continues.

  • Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Thursday November 02, 2023 @07:36PM (#63975614) Homepage

    "and we have a generation of learners who have taken their first steps with coding, science and electronics thanks to the Raspberry Pi"

    As someone who works in IT provision for education, let me tell you something:

    Most RPis end up in teacher's desk drawers, basically unused, until they are obsolete. The teacher resources for the Pi just aren't there, and never have been (and I was a beta-tester for the first batch of Pis, mainly because of my position, and raised it multiple times). No resources, no useful teaching happening.

    Sure "the kids can just play in Scratch". But they'll do that on their Chromebooks or PCs by preference, every time. They aren't wiring gadgets up, except one geek, because the teacher doesn't know how to wire the gadgets up.

    These things are not educational. They're just computers.

    Now let me also tell you: I have any number of IT product suppliers where their product is basically a Raspberry Pi hidden in a box.

    OpenPath, now called Aviglon (a Motorola company) basically sell an access control system that's nothing more than a Raspberry Pi in a box and a few relays. Their software is loaded on microSD, and reports back to a cloud interface. When it goes wrong, someone remotes into the Raspberry Pi and reinstalls it.

    nComputing - who used to sell a lot of thin clients to schools back in the day. Their device is now a Raspberry Pi in a box, with a custom "rdesktop" program that remotes into a server and displays whatever content is on the RDP session.

    Raspberry Pi makes all these cute noises about being for education - it's nonsense. They are a cheap embedded device and their primary customers are not schools, not hobbyists, not kids. It's industry replacing custom boards with cheap commodity kid.

    And you can prove it - for the last 12-18 months, Pi 4's were almost impossible to get hold of. Because commercial customers were prioritised above all else. Not schools, industry.

    Sorry, but every time people roll out this "Raspberry Pi is going to make your kids coding geniuses" crap, I have to comment.

    I'm a coder.
    I work exclusively in IT.
    I work exclusively in the education industry.

    It's crap.

    • I have no points yet I must mod.

      I have seen a Pi used by a VOIP company as an on-site PBX. I've seen them used for home automation setups. I've used them as Kodi boxes.

      I have a couple of them right now, and I can't recall the last time they were turned on because, as you say, nobody's wiring anything to them. It's easier to spin up a new VM than bother with more hardware.

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