[erichocean]

> because of much longer guaranteed support/supply life

The underlying components in the Pi Zero also have a long "guaranteed" support/supply life. You don't have to rely on the Pi foundation for your components, or the board itself (as I pointed out in another reply in this thread).

My primary point is that the cost of a GPU these days is very close to zero, so I see little benefit in picking a platform that doesn't have one if you need that capability.

[akiselev]

Uhhh have you ever dealt with Broadcom? The BCM2835 chip powering the RPi zero isn't something you can buy without negotiating with Broadcom directly and a minimum order size in the tens or hundreds of thousands. That is a far cry from STM parts you can order off of Digikey or Mouser. Even some of my bigger clients won't base products on Broadcom chips for that reason alone.

And no, even in the best of cases where you have great software support from the vendor (ha! as if) and a great reference design, adding a GPU to a design is expensive because of both software and hardware R&D. unless you have an integrated CPU/GPU combo but then you're back to the problem of dealing with Qualcomm/Broadcom.