Sony Backs Maker of Tiny Raspberry Pi Computers With Fresh Funding, Access To AI Chips (cnbc.com) 31
The company behind the Raspberry Pi line of computers has raised fresh investment from Sony's semiconductor unit, in a deal aimed at advancing its efforts in artificial intelligence. From a report: Sony Semiconductor Solutions, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation, invested an undisclosed amount in Raspberry Pi Ltd, the trading company of Raspberry Pi, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. The extent of the funding was not revealed, but Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi's co-founder and CEO, said that the firm raised the cash at the same $500 million valuation it was worth in a 2021 funding round, when it brought in $45 million.
Upton established Raspberry Pi in 2012 with the aim of making computing more accessible to young people. Raspberry Pi's tiny single-board computers are the size of a credit card and have been used to build everything from high-altitude balloons to small radio-controlled submarines. Raspberry Pi's customers were mainly hobbyists and teachers in the early days. The company has since become a more active player in the enterprise -- in a typical year, roughly 70% of its sales now come from commercial customers embedding its products into factories or consumer devices, Upton told CNBC.
Upton established Raspberry Pi in 2012 with the aim of making computing more accessible to young people. Raspberry Pi's tiny single-board computers are the size of a credit card and have been used to build everything from high-altitude balloons to small radio-controlled submarines. Raspberry Pi's customers were mainly hobbyists and teachers in the early days. The company has since become a more active player in the enterprise -- in a typical year, roughly 70% of its sales now come from commercial customers embedding its products into factories or consumer devices, Upton told CNBC.
Access to chips? (Score:4, Insightful)
How about access to regular chips so one can actually buy a Raspberry Pi again?
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that'd be broadcom's problem, not Sony
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Maybe one day we'll see a post on Slashdot about Intel making ARM chips. I'm sure there will be a long list of slashdotters telling how this is unlikely to ever happen. :)
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Raspberry Pi is probably big enough they could make their own custom ARM processor, especially with Sony's help. Maybe the Pi 5 will use that.
The Pico has no supply issues.
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Raspberry Pi is a side project for Broadcom. They clearly don't get priority.
Sony has experience in both the design of custom SoCs and integration of third party ones.
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Broadcom are a fabless semiconductor company so I can't see why they should be the reason for shortage in chips, probably the foundries they subcontract to are the bottleneck.
One possible problem may be a lack of new 16 nm process nodes. Most people probably want either the oldest, cheapest process that's still supported (28nm) or one of the newest processes (5nm, 3nm).
Yes, Raspberry have created the RP2040 dual core 32 bit ARM chip used in the Pi Pico but scaling from being able to do that to designing a quad core 64 bit chip would be a massive job & they would still be fabless at the mercy of others.
Agreed. That's probably a bad idea. But it is the beginning of a good idea.
One problem with the Raspberry Pi design is that they use a Broadcom SoC for pretty much everything, which means any sort of non-Broadcom chip is going to cause a partial compatibility break.
If they separate the GPIO functionality, SPI,
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No need for custom SOCs; there are plenty of Pi competitors using Rockchip parts like the RK3388 or RK3399, and they don't seem to have supply problems. What is it about the Broadcom parts in particular that makes them so scarce?
Re: Access to chips? (Score:1)
Raspberry Pi is For-Profit? (Score:2, Insightful)
Are they pulling a fast one like OpenAI did ?
1. Give us help, we're a Not-For-Profit!
2. Profit.
3. Oh, our stuff is worth something now. And we're billionaires! Kaythanxbye!
no (Score:1, Informative)
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Overall, they are a good company. Without them, there likely would not have been a significant commercial market for SBCs, other than the 4x4 format for government/military use (as in expensive, like $1500 for an Intel Atom board).
It would be nice if they could get production ramped up. It is tough to make a "one size fits all" board, just because there are so many things you can throw at an ARM SoC. So far, RPi has struck a balance between features and heat issues, although this might be something that
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I thought Raspberry Pi was a Not-For-Profit? Are they pulling a fast one like OpenAI did ? 1. Give us help, we're a Not-For-Profit! 2. Profit. 3. Oh, our stuff is worth something now. And we're billionaires! Kaythanxbye!
I tried to buy a RP a few months back, when they were just about unobtanium, and if you found one, they were stupid expensive.
There was some stuff on the site about how the Foundation was fulfilling business interests first, because business needed everything they could produce, and to paraphrase, Business is a lot more important than the people who made the foundation successful. Note they didn't say specifically that, that was the reading between the lines.
I bought a Le Potato. Same form factor, a bi
Does this mean... (Score:3)
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Bwahahaha...that's a good one.
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There are indeed many similar SBCs, some of which have better hardware than Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, where they all fall down is software support and development ecosystem. Raspberry Pi software pretty much Just Works with no need for tinkering, and there's a huge development community. A lot of other boards have flaky or terrible software and not much of a developer community.
Prediction (Score:2)
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The other 5% will be complaints about those comments.
Now, when the [CENSORED] will I be able to buy a [CENSORED] Pi?
Here's a more serious question: Which SBCs out there are closest to plug-compatible clones of the pi? There are a lot of nice looking ones out there, most of which come with some sort of Linux distro, but it would be nice if there was one that lived comfortably in the Pi ecosystem.
Open Source (Score:4, Insightful)
Raspberry Pi already received criticism for containing proprietary parts. The graphics stack for example was such an issue (which is slowly being replaced by an open Vulkan implementations). And if I recall correctly the boot process also contained binary blobs.
Why was this important? Even at 90%-ish openness allowed Raspberry Pi to be a viable platform for many good projects. Kernel is stable, GPIO pins work, and there is a huge ecosystem that is not working on so called "raspberry pi killers". Even those with better hardware will succumb to obsoleteness when the kernel can no longer be upgraded.
Now, this additional "AI chip" (AITRIOS, don't forget the ) makes me even more concerned. I have to be honest, I don't have prior experience with that particular platform, but a simple search for "AITRIOS open source" does not seem to return promising results. In fact, one of the top ones is for a subscription: https://markets.businessinside... [businessinsider.com]
I would pretty much prefer a long term open source solution, instead of being tied to the whims of one hardware manufacturer, especially one that is known to drop support for older systems.
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Rootkits preinstalled? (Score:2)
The $5 boards that will cost you $35 (Score:2)
because nobody sells them for the advertised prices. =/