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by eqvinox 771 days ago
I kinda don't understand the point of the CM5. If you want a SoM, you're generally building something "fancy" around it… and at that point anything involving Broadcom is just about the worst choice.

I guess it gets some bump from the shared platform with the Pi, but… there's enough SoMs with good platform support at this point. And it's not like they're notably cheaper than those either?

(ed. I guess they are still cheaper than competing SoMs with roughly equal performance… but you pay the price of a poor closed platform instead)

1 comments

> there's enough SoMs with good platform support at this point

You’re talking about the new (and expensive) Turing RK1 and the Nvidia Jetson as alternatives?

Turing RK1 and similar, nVidia not as much given their platform accessibility is barely better than Broadcom. RK1 is not particularly great either but significantly better than either Broadcom or nVidia.

I agree the really well supported platforms are both older as well as more expensive (e.g. i.MX & Sitara platforms.) However, I won't call the RK1 "expensive" considering it outperforms the Raspberry Pi (5) by a larger factor than it is pricier by (roughly.)

[Ed.:] Actually, no, the RK1 isn't better either, given there doesn't even seem to be a datasheet available for the module as a whole.

I guess I'm just living in my expensive but well-supported world of NXP, TI and ST SoMs that I can actually debug…