Is raspberry pi trapped in its own architecture? The Broadcom SOC chosen 5 years ago may have seemed like a good choice then, but the raspberry pi foundation is now facing an uphill battle since Broadcom doesn’t seem to be providing any significant updates to the raspberry pi, other than clock increases. You have the whole codebase based around this one chip, and I worry that this will mean painful migrations if raspberry pi ever switches to a new architecture
Er... what? The SoC has received multiple major updates. The Pi 3+ has a a quad-core, 64-bit SoC -- it's the same SoC family as the one in the original Pi, but a rather different CPU core.
Yup. The Pi has been based on ARMv8 architecture since late 2016, the same architecture that the latest Apple mobile chip(A11) is based on. There's plenty of room to grow in the Broadcom line. The only part that really needs attention is the bundled GPU which IIRC has never been updated since the RPi has been introduced.
And yet they have already said there is nowhere else to go with this 40nm process. They'd need to port it to a newer node and that's a huge job which may not happen.
Okay, sure. They changed the arm core. But the IO, the single USB port (internal), the video core, the lack of sata, poor SD card speed, these all remain.
It's a hobbyist computer/learning platform whose biggest draws are price and community support. Demand/support isn't flagging so performance and connectivity doesn't seem to be an issue for the target market. The biggest community wishes were answered, more USB ports and bundled wifi. If the RPi can't keep up with what you're doing there are plenty of other more powerful and more expensive options out there.
There are plenty of more powerful and cheaper options too, it's just that the Raspberry Pi has mindshare amongst people writing about hobbyist and maker stuff. I have decidedly mixed feelings about the Raspberry Pi community as a whole; while they're certainly vocal and numerous, they used to have an unfortunate cultural tendency towards blaming any problems on the users being too stupid to use a Pi, even ones caused by major bugs in the Pi itself.
Wondering if you can link some examples of this? Genuinely curious. I've been using the Pi for some for-fun projects lately and haven't encountered limitations caused by the platform just yet so I haven't experienced this (yet? hopefully ever?).
Orange Pi and ODROID-C2, and there are a few slightly more expensive but vastly faster and higher specced options (like the Tinker Board). But the onboarding experience and ongoing support is usually far worse than with the Pi.
