Broadcom "enabled" the Pi to be created because the SoC for the original RPi 1 was a flop. They wanted to use it for Set Top Box (Cable TV, Google TV etc) devices but couldn't find any buyers
One of the engineers who worked on it worked out a deal with Broadcom to simply reuse the design and market it toward education instead
And it boots with the GPU which is not 3D accelerated in version 4 because the whole project was done by one person who just left. This is one of most popular SBCs out there. I wish it was a bit better.
Are there any high performance single-board computers on the market currently? I use a lot of Rpi's in personal projects, and I've been thinking about a home file server in a super small form-factor. What I would like is an SBC somewhere on the size scale of a smartphone, with performance in the range of a current flagship phone.
One of the engineers who worked on it worked out a deal with Broadcom to simply reuse the design and market it toward education instead