press report favors Farnell

Since the core of RS's problem is that Broadcom can't fulfil orders for the SoC at a sufficient rate, someone should open a new thread requesting that the next major Pi redesign should use an ARM SoC from a different manufacturer.

Let's see how long that thread lasts.

Though, if you were to post that, I'd suggest creating an account specifically for it as you wouldn't be able to login soon after!

Broadcom can't fulfill the orders fast enough?  Do you have a link for that?

I do remember several threads that asked for a different CPU, the answer was always the choice of the broadcom chip (BCM2835?  Something close to that) was merely a matter of choice.  Now you can take that as truth or politic speach, but the threads were left opedened.

You are all flogging a dead horse...pointless to say the least.

There is too much pressure to rush to market, too many different skills to coordinate, and too few checks before announcements are made.

Slow down everyone, and keep calm...let everyone involved take their time to do their jobs, this constant hounding serves no purpose.

mynameisJim wrote:

 

Broadcom can't fulfill the orders fast enough?  Do you have a link for that?

It says so in the article linked in the headline post of this thread, but we've also read mention of it on the RPF forums more than once.  Usually RS gets painted with the finger of "blame" for order mismanagement, but I don't see how the blame lies with RS if they need more BCM2835 devices to deal with their backlog but Broadcom can't supply them at sufficient speed.

All I know is that RS must be loosing money by the bucketload over this, I don't work in a technical environment so i'm not going to know many other people that are interested or even aware of the Pi, but for both of the people that I know that did order from RS, both have cancelled. One re-ordered from CPC and had one in 48 hours, the other went and found something else to play with.

If it is because Broadcom can't supply the chips fast enough, I can't imagine RS aren't going to be happy ? I thought I read somewhere that the manufacturers have to put in advanced orders, so could it be that RS just misunderstood the great demand there would be ?

Hmm... RS says Broadcom can't fill it fast enough, yet Farnell had no problems, and the Roku is having no problems.  I think Steve is right, it sounds like there's a lead time and RS underestimated the demand for the PI while Farnell did not and is now saying there's a difficulty in getting the chips fast enough.

there was a post by (i think) jamesh over in the RPF forum that I can't find now, saying that it takes at least a couple of months to put an order through the fab depending on capacity and that broadcom didn't build this particular SoC to stock, but only to order.

So you're therefore into a capacity of X allocated to Y customers with a lead time of Z simple maths problem. It could be that Farnell put in a much larger initial order or a better planned (X per month over the next 12 months) and have got current capacity tied up for some time.

With the best will in the world, bringing more capacity online will take time and have costs, plus the actual manufacturing lead time.  Being able to get the device quicker but that multiplying the cost by a factor of five probably isn't going to work in a low margin product like the Pi, so RS may simply have no choice but to wait.

so could it be that RS just misunderstood the great demand there would be ?

Possible, but seems unlikely. You don't put up a 'register your interest' page, build a seperate supply chain, ordering mechanism etc. if you don't have some idea it's going to be big.

Details of confidential contracts between different companies aside, you'd have thought that someone either on the broadcom side or the chinese manufacturing side would have been able to see the discrepancy between RS/Farnell orders and push things in the right direction long before it became the big public problem it now has.

Alternately, RS must have known what it's allocation and lead times from Broadcom were well in advance. Continuing to take orders at what seems to have been massively higher numbers than expected seems like a bad decision.

Fine, keep taking expressions of interest, just warn of the potential lead times and don't promote those to actual orders. Continuing to take money for something they now know they don't have the capacity to deliver anytime soon is IMHO a bad idea, and as that's their decision they can't blame broadcom for it.

I take the point about the infrastructure they built around the ordering process, but I always wondered if that was to keep what they considered was the core part of their business separate. When I called Farnell about my Pi, they were more than happy to deal with it over the phone, but when doing the same with RS as soon as I mentioned Raspberry I was told they couldn't help and I could only e-mail.

I know it isn't much of a sample, but I get the feeling Farnell integrated it much more into the BAU stuff, whereas RS bolted stuff on to handle it. At one point, I was told emailing woud get me a response in 10 days, so it doesn't really feel like they really knew what they were taking on?

Completely agree as to why someone from Broadcom didn't have a word in RS's ear and ask why their orders were an order of magnitude different from Farnell.