[shodan757]

This looked pretty cool until I found a price: ~$100.

Lots of cool features, and it's a beagleboard, so there will be actual support/documentation/source. But I'm not sure $100 is "affordable" for the SoC you get and the small 2GB of RAM.

[bsder]

> This looked pretty cool until I found a price: ~$100.

The price is exactly where it belongs without Broadcom subsidizing things so they can be given away.

Of course, since Broadcom is no longer subsidizing things, mere mortals can't get an RPi anymore.

But, don't worry, Broadcom is happy to give them to companies like T-Mobile now that all the suckers^W users created an ecosystem for them.

[throwaway81523]

> The price is exactly where it belongs without Broadcom subsidizing things so they can be given away.

A bazillion mobile phones with similar cpus, ram, AND screen, cameras and other sensors, battery, bla bla bla aren't being subsidized. Lots of them are at similar price levels.

[bradfa]

As I mentioned in another comment, 2GB is the maximum memory size that all of the processors within the SOC can access, so it's a perfectly reasonable amount of RAM to spec for this SOC.

The Cortex-A CPUs can access more than 2GB but because that memory requires more than 32 bit addressing, the other processors cannot easily access it.

This is a common theme in similar TI SOCs. For example, the AM57xx SOC which are used on the Beagle-X15 and Beagle-AI can have more memory available to the Cortex-A15 than can be possibly made available to the DSP and Cortex-M4 processors. The Cortex-A15 has a special interface to the memory controller which enables extended address use beyond 32 bits where-as the other processors and subsystems within the SOC are all attached to a bus where 32 bit addresses are the maximum.

[KMag]

> The Cortex-A CPUs can access more than 2GB but because that memory requires more than 32 bit addressing, the other processors cannot easily access it.

What's preventing the 32-bit CPUs from accessing the full 4 GB of a 32-bit address space?

[bradfa]

The main memory map places the DDR memory starting at 0x8000_0000 up to 0xffff_ffff in both AM62x and AM57xx. Below 0x8000_0000 are a bunch of other memory mapped devices and interfaces.

Additional memory beyond 2GB are all located above 0x1_0000_0000 address.

[joezydeco]

As a development board, $100 is a bargain.

[jeron]

We've definitely been spoiled by RPi, up until the shortage and costs of RPis shooting through the roof

[joezydeco]

Before I tell you kids to get off my lawn, there was a time when development kits were thousands of dollars, and only if you had a good business relationship with a chipmaker.

TI actually had BeagleBoard (not BeagleBone) and PandaBoard for OMAP long before RPI came along. Those were nice, but still were close to $200. Probably $300 in today's dollars.

[smcl]

Yeah for a while before RPi and Arduino embedded/DSP dev hardware was pricey. I still remember when I worked for ADI that their “EZ-Kit” SHARC and Blackfin development boards were insanely expensive, >$500 each or so. The real kicker was that the JTAG emulator you programmed it with with cost thousands of dollars. Never made sense to me, I always figured if people were putting in orders worth millions, why not just offer dev kits and software for some nominal fee.

Someone later produced a cheaper Blackfin dev board called the “STAMP” and sold it for ~$100ish and worked to support uCLinux and a GCC backend. Picked one of those up and did a bunch of hacking in my own time, really fun stuff.

[joezydeco]

And before JTAG you had in-circuit emulators which could cost tens of thousands of dollars. And even today we're spoiled by Seeger JLink. The Lauterbach tools used to be the only game in town for ARM besides ARM's own stuff and it was all crazy expensive. But it was pretty powerful too.

And back in those days if you were a high volume customer you got all the development tools for nothing. But that didn't help startups and tinkerers at all. Hacking hardware in the early days was not easy.

[Havoc]

But only because SBC price are insane right now

[joezydeco]

No, this is what parts cost, don't let Broadcom fool you with the RPi SoC.

This TI AM625 is around $18 in high quantity. When you add in all the connectors and DRAM and the PCB/assembly it sure looks like a $100 retail cost is almost selling it for no profit.

[bayindirh]

2GB of RAM nowhere small. Actually, it's ample from my perspective.

I can fit a home server with some to spare to 512MB.