Questions for Eben Upton to answer at Maker Faire?

Can you comment on whether this statement from http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware is true, and if there are any updates on it?

"SoC:  CPU core [...] GPU core [...] DSP core:

There is a DSP, but there isn't currently a public API (Liz thinks the BC team are keen to make one available at some point)"

http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware

Can you comment on whether this statement from http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware is true, and if there are any updates on it?

"SoC:  CPU core [...] GPU core [...] DSP core:

There is a DSP, but there isn't currently a public API (Liz thinks the BC team are keen to make one available at some point)"

http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware

Also, a surprising number* of SD memory cards are reported as sometimes or always not working with the R-Pi (not counting the Class 10 bug which is apparently fixed). Is there ongoing work to identify possible reasons for this?

*http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#SD_cards

Hi, I was able to ask Eben this directly.  He said they are keen to figure out a way to allow people to access the low-level functionality, but didn't give a definitive answer as to when or how.  He did say though that unfortunately it would not be via OpenCL.

Broadcom seems to need a top-level tete-a-tete with someone they can't ignore about openess.  Their legendary obsession with keeping information out of the public eye may be fine for commercial applications, but it's not fine for a board with educational goals.

I believe there should be over hundred thousand Pi's out in the world by the end of June.  If that does happened as planned, then I hope the shear number of people using them should push Broadcom in the right direction.  I took the progress with with the camera module and encoding on the RPi Foundation blog as a positive sign, but there is a lot of latent functionality remaining.

Hi - sorry didn't get a chance to ask this one directly.  But video answers were filmed when I wasn't there so hopefully it was included.  Video production is going on right now and will posted in this group when ready (I'll post a note here if it ends up being elsewhere).

Just watched http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIf4Fk2252A and the answer is at 21 minute mark.

Thanks Drew, great videos.

Yeah, I watched the section at 21mins a second time, and it's really depressing.  Broadcom just doesn't care twopence about the open community, not even when they suddenly find themselves in the limelight heading a programme designed for open education.  Pitiful.

If you look at the ridiculous  "justifications" they give at http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=6188 , it really highlights how they have absolutely no logical ground to stand on for keeping the APIs closed.

It summarizes pretty clearly as "We won't open because we don't do that, so go away."  I don't expect any movement whatsoever from them, as Broadcom has always had that reputation for being unfriendly to the open source community.