Quote from: nobitakun on August 10, 2021, 18:39:53
Why the heck they are going to use a Snapdragon CPU when the guy works for Broadcom? It's going to be a Broadcom SoC, like it or leave it.
Anyways, what the company needs to do is to segmentate the market. Have one line of Raspberries for school like it's been for years with various models with moderate specs but low price, another for handheld devices focused on very low power usage with less I/O ports and another for heavy tasks, such as high end CPU+GPU + various configurations of decent amount of RAM, for use on virtualization, emulation or high server load tasks. Any of the configurations could have something like a Type-C port that could output to 1 or 2 screens up to 2160p60Hz, so you don't need to include 2 video ports. The adapter would come or not with the boards, being able to hook up a standard Type-C to video cable anyways if we only need one monitor. Those adapters are not a big investment, HDMI + VGA is about 8€.
That way everyone would be happy of choosing the one they want for the purpose they need.
I don't think they should bother creating different tiers of CPU+GPU per gen. One size fits all is cheaper and easier, they want to use cheap older nodes like 28nm as long as they can, and performance is becoming acceptable (on the CPU side). Pi 5 with 4x Cortex-A75 would be good enough for most users, and they could increase the core count for a Pi 6 at the same time they move away from 28nm.
The GPU is awful, and they might want to boost it to target machine learning (for education, the cameras that they sell, and robotics).
To segment the market, they could reintroduce the Model A, and put more expensive I/O features in the Model B. 2/4/8 GB RAM is fine for Model A, but they could add a higher SKU for Model B. I guess 12 GB if not 16 GB. I didn't expect them to do that for Pi 5 but Eben Upton wants us to think it's a possibility.
The education market is eating up the Pi 400, that is the product for them. Nothing needs to change for a Pi 500, except maybe bringing back the 3.5mm jack and including an 8 GB RAM SKU.