Interesting article about the Raspberry PI

"An in-depth Digital Foundry interview on the remarkable capabilities of the upcoming $25 credit-card sized computer

The concept of a $25 computer may well border on the unbelievable, but within weeks the phenomenal Raspberry Pi initiative will finally bear fruit. After years in development, the first production run of 10,000 credit card-sized computers will be available for sale, the aim being to bring an affordable homebrew programming platform to the masses - a modern day successor to the home computers of the 80s, if you will.

In this interview, Raspberry Pi’s executive director, Eben Upton, talks to Digital Foundry about the background to the project, the creation of the hardware, its wealth of potential across a number of fields - and what the games business can do to help it succeed.

And being Digital Foundry, we also talk about the device’s surprisingly powerful technical specification. Can the $25 Raspberry Pi graphics core double the performance of the A5 chip found inside the £500 iPhone 4S on certain tasks? You read it here first…"

The sad parts of the Pi:

[quote]What hardware documentation will be available?

Broadcom dont release a full datasheet for the BCM2835, which is the chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi. We will release a datasheet for the SoC which will cover the hardware exposed on the Raspi board e.g. the GPIOs. We will also release a board schematic later on.

But I want documentation for !

Other documentation may be released in future but this will be at the Foundations discretion.

But I demand the documentation for the chip. Give it to me!

To get the full SoC documentation you would need to sign an NDA with Broadcom, who make the chip and sell it to us. But you would also need to provide a business model and estimate of how many chips you are going to sell.
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