[dirkf]

On a related note: I have the impression Broadcom is more and more losing terrain to the likes of Qualcomm and Mediatek. A couple of years ago nearly everybody was using Broadcom chips in their products (or at least in the consumer-grade telecom devices I'm familiar with as part of my job). Now I'm seeing a shift away from them.

I can't really say if it's due to better features, price, vendor support, open source support, documentation, or perhaps all of the above. In any case, some competition is certainly welcome.

[stragies]

If you check out the forum.openwrt.org, you'll see, that broadcom support is mostly limited to Raspberry PI devices, and some 400Mhz museum pieces.

9/10 times the turned-down requests for OpenWrt support of Device XY are because of Broadcom SOCs/Wireless_chips in the device.

[unmole]

On the other hand, Broadcom is dominant in high end network gear. The only real competition was Tofino which Intel killed off.

[bgnn]

it's because of the CEO Hock Tan. Broadcom became a sort of investment fund rather than an engineering company. Hock even wanted to buy Qualcomm but got blocked by Trump. This was because it was very likely Hock would just divide it into pieces, cut R&D and start charging 2-3x more for the existing products like he did for Broadcom, symantec, CA techmologies and now vmware. He even sued Broadcom customers like VW.. Despite all this its stock is rising and rising..

[Gibbon1]

If you asked for my reflexive feeling about using a Broadcom chip in a new design the answer is you're asking to be in a abusive relationship with a supplier.

[unmole]

TINA. You aren't exactly spoilt for choice if you want to build a 400G switch.

[bgnn]

True. Luckily the competition is catching up fast. Though Marvell isn't so much different.

[qwertox]

Broadcom is so odd that I get the feeling that they landed a huge hidden deal with the US government that they no longer have the need to do traditional free-market business.