[rmoriz]

Yes and no. At least it created a modest tinkering culture while the mainstream went with smart phones. I wonder if RISC-V will help us getting over ARM* or if RISC-V SoC vendors will try to create their own walled garden, proprietary interfaces and GPUs/codec support.

* = The issues with the Raspberry PI are both with Broadcom's closed source hardware (there are other tinkering boards with more open hardware) and of course with the license model of ARM.

[greyhair]

I agree there are other 'tinkering' boards with more open hardware, but the Pi has the advantage of a huge community of very nice supporters. Maybe even as nice as the community over on arduino. The biggest problem with Broadcom on the Pi is the videocore block, and if you never run the video (using it for IoT), you avoid the biggest black hole on the device.

As far as the ARM license goes, very few people are ever going to spin their own hardware, and at least the ARM programming API/ISA is very well documented. We'll see if that continues under NVidia.

Certainly MOS, ST, National, Zilog, Motorola, INtel, IBM, Dec, (etc etc) CPU were always closed source. That did not prevent anyone from learning about computer systems and programming then, and it won't stop them now.

That said, I doubt Apple will ever make the M1 available for purchase. Which is where this thread started.

[justforyou]

>> The biggest problem with Broadcom on the Pi is the videocore block, and if you never run the video (using it for IoT), you avoid the biggest black hole on the device.

Avoiding the black hole does not solve the part of the problem where you are financally supporting closed hardware and disincentivising the Rasberry PI foundation fron doing the right thing.