[zumtar]

Interesting to see a Broadcom logo and chip markings visible on the CPU now.

Love 'em or hate 'em, I suspect Broadcom are very happy about this as those chip markings are prime marketing real estate.

Considering the phenomenal success of the previous Raspberry Pi units this probably formed part of the negotiations for the CPU price.

There are of course other considerations such as trace lengths and availability of packages for both the CPU and LPDDR2 but that logo being directly in the hands of the engineers of tomorrow makes a big difference.

The previous models used a PoP (Package-on-Package) stack of the CPU and SDRAM and now they've moved to discrete SoC and DDR2 packages (with the DDR2 chip now on the underside of the PCB).

[pjc50]

One of the announcement posts said "this Broadcom chip will be available for sale subject to meeting MOQ". So I'm expecting someone will do a kickstarter to buy 10k of them and reship them as singles. No longer doing POP moves it from "nope" territory into something the average small assembly house should be able to cope with. Not that you need to do this given that the compute module exists, but I'm sure someone will want to do it.