Pi vs BeagleBone-Black

Stuart Richards wrote:

 

Billy Thornton wrote:

 

I'm reckoning you gonna have to ask Roku (stuff like this is secret for obvious reasons), but I'm reckoning  in the single digit millions, probably about 3, given the number of devices the chip is in.

 

My guess is that there are significantly less BCM2835 SoC based non-Raspberry Pi devices in existence than there are Raspberry Pis.  I think there is a strong possibility Broadcom had a significant number of BCM2835 SoCs that they couldn't sell prior to the Pi.

Well I would say see my previous post to this exact statement you made just a couple of posts ago, but it would seem the police state keeps censoring them so here it is again:  That is not the way chip manufacturing works.  You don't build a huge excess, especially if you're continuing with the idea that the chip was a failure.  You build to meet the order and while I keep saying you might end up with just a small buffer to fill capacity, the reality of the situation is that, more often than not, you force the individual to purchase in quantities equal to a production batch quantity.

mynameisJim wrote:

 

Stuart Richards wrote:

 

Billy Thornton wrote:

 

I'm reckoning you gonna have to ask Roku (stuff like this is secret for obvious reasons), but I'm reckoning  in the single digit millions, probably about 3, given the number of devices the chip is in.

 

My guess is that there are significantly less BCM2835 SoC based non-Raspberry Pi devices in existence than there are Raspberry Pis.  I think there is a strong possibility Broadcom had a significant number of BCM2835 SoCs that they couldn't sell prior to the Pi.

Well I would say see my previous post to this exact statement you made just a couple of posts ago, but it would seem the police state keeps censoring them so here it is again:  That is not the way chip manufacturing works.  You don't build a huge excess, especially if you're continuing with the idea that the chip was a failure.  You build to meet the order and while I keep saying you might end up with just a small buffer to fill capacity, the reality of the situation is that, more often than not, you force the individual to purchase in quantities equal to a production batch quantity.

My statements are not identical.  To clarify, when I referred to devices in my first post about this I meant products developed, not units sold.  I was referring to units sold in my subsequent post.  As far as I am aware the Roku 2 line of products is the only one prior to the Raspberry Pi that use the BCM2835 SoC.  I'm sure Broadcom didn't develop the BCM2835 exclusively for Roku and therefore must've been disappointed by the total number of design wins it achieved.

FYI,

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-11/roku-sales-hit-5-million-thanks-to-amazon-netflix

And here is Roku's blog article http://blog.roku.com/blog/2013/04/10/celebrating-5-million-roku-players/

-J

Stuart Richards wrote:

 

mynameisJim wrote:

 

Stuart Richards wrote:

 

Billy Thornton wrote:

 

I'm reckoning you gonna have to ask Roku (stuff like this is secret for obvious reasons), but I'm reckoning  in the single digit millions, probably about 3, given the number of devices the chip is in.

 

My guess is that there are significantly less BCM2835 SoC based non-Raspberry Pi devices in existence than there are Raspberry Pis.  I think there is a strong possibility Broadcom had a significant number of BCM2835 SoCs that they couldn't sell prior to the Pi.

Well I would say see my previous post to this exact statement you made just a couple of posts ago, but it would seem the police state keeps censoring them so here it is again:  That is not the way chip manufacturing works.  You don't build a huge excess, especially if you're continuing with the idea that the chip was a failure.  You build to meet the order and while I keep saying you might end up with just a small buffer to fill capacity, the reality of the situation is that, more often than not, you force the individual to purchase in quantities equal to a production batch quantity.

 

My statements are not identical.  To clarify, when I referred to devices in my first post about this I meant products developed, not units sold.  I was referring to units sold in my subsequent post.  As far as I am aware the Roku 2 line of products is the only one prior to the Raspberry Pi that use the BCM2835 SoC.  I'm sure Broadcom didn't develop the BCM2835 exclusively for Roku and therefore must've been disappointed by the total number of design wins it achieved.

See whatcha did there! Lots of chips make money with only one design win, so its not really a problem,. If this SoC was designed as the rumours go (gotta gpu, lets put a cheap arm on it for a laugh), then its probably never intended to sell lots of volume anyway. SO I reckon its done wayyy better than broacom expected. 6M chips is pretty decent. Not in mobile phone areas, but this aint a modern mobile phone chip - no modem.

jamodio wrote:

 

FYI,

 

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-11/roku-sales-hit-5-million-thanks-to-amazon-netflix

 

 

And here is Roku's blog article http://blog.roku.com/blog/2013/04/10/celebrating-5-million-roku-players/

 

-J

Cheers dude, saves me calling in some favours.

Billy Thornton wrote:

 

jamodio wrote:

 

FYI,

 

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-11/roku-sales-hit-5-million-thanks-to-amazon-netflix

 

 

And here is Roku's blog article http://blog.roku.com/blog/2013/04/10/celebrating-5-million-roku-players/

 

-J

Cheers dude, saves me calling in some favours.

I stand corrected.  A very significant portion of those 5 million units will be non-BCM2835 devices though.

So I did email a couple of mates who know about his stuff, andthey said get stuffed you aussie twonk, that's confidential info. So no numbers, and they said without actually wkring at broadcom, you will not have the sdlighest idea what the numbers are so you cant make any claims about anything. So that told me. Only gab I got was that the they are happy with the chip. That make me think its sold pretty well, for a chip that doesnt go in a phone.

Stuart Richards wrote:

 

mynameisJim wrote:

 

Stuart Richards wrote:

 

My guess is that there are significantly less BCM2835 SoC based non-Raspberry Pi devices in existence than there are Raspberry Pis.  I think there is a strong possibility Broadcom had a significant number of BCM2835 SoCs that they couldn't sell prior to the Pi.

Well I would say see my previous post to this exact statement you made just a couple of posts ago, but it would seem the police state keeps censoring them so here it is again:  That is not the way chip manufacturing works.  You don't build a huge excess, especially if you're continuing with the idea that the chip was a failure.  You build to meet the order and while I keep saying you might end up with just a small buffer to fill capacity, the reality of the situation is that, more often than not, you force the individual to purchase in quantities equal to a production batch quantity.

 

My statements are not identical.  To clarify, when I referred to devices in my first post about this I meant products developed, not units sold.  I was referring to units sold in my subsequent post.  As far as I am aware the Roku 2 line of products is the only one prior to the Raspberry Pi that use the BCM2835 SoC.  I'm sure Broadcom didn't develop the BCM2835 exclusively for Roku and therefore must've been disappointed by the total number of design wins it achieved.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding the difference you're going for (sorry).  To clarify, in both cases aren't you suggesting that there were a "significant number of BCM2836 SoCs that they couldn't sell"? I.e. they had a stockpile of them somewhere?  If the second post is more "Oh darn, we didn't sell as much as we had hoped when we designed this, but at least there isn't a warehouse full of them."  Then until we were getting some numbers on the Roku I would have said I agree that that's possibility, though I don't think it would have affected the Pi.

I mean first off it suggests a stronger connection between the foundation and broadcom than evidence supports.  I get that it's fun to concoct theories and possibilities by sniping comments out of context and ignoring common business practice for this field, but's all about occam's razor.  Either the foundation has been lying about everything for over 2 years, broadcom made a dummy charity and forced one of its employees to get a second mortgage on his home just to sweeten the deception, and 6 people went along with this deception despite the fact that 4 or 5  of them don't have any affiliation with broadcom at all (I'm not sure about Pete Lomas).  OR they're inexperienced and are learning in the school of hard knocks what it takes to get the job done resulting in sometimes conflicting statements.

Also, assuming the less likely deception angle is in fact true, why use a chip that (in the scenario you presented) is failing for an additional 10K in sales?  No one really thought the pi would be as hot an item as its been.  Towards the end before the launch it looks like people were starting to think more than 10k would be sold, but over a million?  From a manufacture standpoint, it doesn't stand to reason to try to boost sales on a failing chip when you don't have an excess of stock just lying around, which a supplier such as Farnell might (If they were allowed to puchase the chip, lol), but a manufacture would not.

Also, I had said what follows previously, but that post mysteriously vanished, ho hum.

I like the idea of the Begeal bone black.  I'm concerned that its primary OS is an embedded OS as opposed to a full fledged OS.  I know that it has a full OS option, but it's not receiving the love attention the embedded one is.  I'm also interested in the on-chip ethernet it comes with and how it ultimately communicates with the CPU.  Like the Pi, one thing that concerns me is the spotty documentation.  I've been able to find things like this https://github.com/beagleboard/am335x_pru_package through google, but it doesn't seem to be giving the full story and I could not find it via the main site.  Finally, I don't like that to get some sort of video option that I have to purchase an addition "cape".  Horses for courses as they say, it definitely fits the bill as a contender for the Model A as it is geared more towards the hobbyist who need more CPU power than the Pi can provide.

8080man wrote:

 

Jim, you're very insightful about the Begeal bone black.  I also previously wrote that it was f***ing crap, and also had my post mysteriously deleted. Maybe this one will get through. Why they would even bother selling a device with such crap documentation and such a crap ethernet and such crap OSs to choose from is beyond me.  Thank you for daring to speak truth to power here.

Thanks, but let's be fair, The pi had the same set of problems as the begeal is facing when it was first released.  The two boards seem to be neck and neck on documentation, it's enough to do what you need, but we'd like to see more.  While the pi didn't have ethernet problems, since it was on the usb bus too high an ethernet usage caused severe problems with keyboards (which got a temp fix imho early on but has only really been addressed for the majority of people relatively recently), and even the OS initially had issues.  I know that some people still use the soft float version of Debian, strangely enough, but it wasn't until Raspbian really got underway that there was a legit OS for the Pi for the standard user.

So it's unfair to describe the board as being crap.  It's a new device that has issues to work out.  I think that those issues will be solved quicker than they were on the Pi because these is a TI product being released by TI with TI parts so it's going to have more "it's your full time job to work on this" and less "I'm allowed to spend some time at work looking at it" that the Pi has, I just think they're also legit issue that do need to be properly addressed.

I don't think they're really in direct competition with each other though.  Much like the pi and the arduino, they can complement each other nicely.  I could fully see myself using the pi as a front end and communicating to the bone black via SPI and letting the bone black handle the heavy lifting.  I think I might come out ahead financially as opposed to using something like the gertboard... but I haven't looked at prices in a while so I might be mistaken.

8080man wrote:

 

why does this crap site keep craping out when I try to post???  I keep getting "jive temporarily available".  Frustrating.

 

Jim, I read the T&C's yesterday, and I know we aren't supposed to talk politics, so I won't talk politics.  But I see it's OK to at least mention a politician, since Gary Hart was mentioned recently.  So I'll mention Geraldine Ferraro.  I think she looks a lot like Meg Ryan, and I had a crush on Meg Ryan, so I noticed Geraldine.  Among other things, she was the 2008 campaign manager for Hilary Clinton, but got into trouble for saying something like if Obama wasn't black, he wouldn't be doing nearly as well.  Ferraro got dismissed from the campaign, but she famously said "but it's true", and I like someone like you who can stand up for what they believe and say "but it's true" just as well as Geraldine.

lol, I'm going to take that as a compliment, I think?