
High-res pics of the Raspberry Pi PCBs - renownedmedia
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/402
======
ChuckMcM
This is something that is creeping me out about the Pi, does the processor
exist? I know that is a weird question but if you go to the Broadcom site and
search for BCM 2835 it doesn't find anything, if you search for it you can
find this page: <http://www.broadcom.com/products/BCM2835> but that has no
real data on the chip. The great guys at Octopart.com can't find it either.

It supposed to run Linux but without a datasheet for the CPU and its
peripheral how does it do that? And what sort of support will Broadcom offer?

The FAQ says _"In general, you need to look to see whether the program you
want can be compiled for the ARMv6 architecture."_ , ARM V6 (aka ARM 11)
rather than Cortex architecture seems a bit behind kinda.

And the discussions in the forums about details of the chip being redacted in
comments here:
[http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum?mingleforumaction=viewtopic...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=36)

Then we compare the T.I. OMAP 4430 chip (used in the Chumby, Pandaboard, etc)
which is the only other ARM chip that can do HD Video and it costs $15/chip in
quantity.

As someone who has built this sort of thing in the past I am really wondering
if they are going to pull it off or flame out. Clearly I hope they pull it off
but am really wondering how.

~~~
liz_upton
I work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and I can assure you that the chip
exists. If you do a bit more googling, you'll find it's in already out there
in the millions in other devices - the Roku set top box, for example.

That thread you linked to is from early on in the summer, before we had
finished negotiations with our vendors and had documentation in place that
allowed us to say that the SoC we are using is the BCM2835. If you search for
BCM2835 on our website, you'll see that since then there's a lot of discussion
about it with the name there in full.

We're all on track to have the first units out by the end of the year (which
will be auctioned) and to be producing them in large numbers in January -
there's not much more I can say to dampen your speculation, so I guess you'll
just have to wait so you can watch us pull it off.

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is perhaps the best news I've heard today. I don't suppose you could
liberate a datasheet from Broadcom and post it to your web site somewhere
could you? I'm totally down for 10 of those $35 boards but I want to be able
to talk to the graphics side of the chip and have had no luck at all getting
any information at all from Broadcom. OMAP docs I've got coming out of my ears
though.

------
epscylonb
Really excited about the pi, I can see lots of hackers doing interesting
things with these.

