Episode 772 Transcript

FLOSS-772

Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, episode 772, recorded Wednesday, February 28th. Raspberry Pi from the man himself.

This week, Elliot Williams joins me and we talk with Evan Upton about the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a potential IPO, and we get some feature requests in for some future products. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Welcome to Floss Weekly, the show about free Libre and open source software and hardware. Well, for today, it's about hardware too. It's not just me, of course. We've got Elliot Williams, the editor in chief here at Hackaday. And Elliot, what is this madness?

Elliot: What is this madness? Um Which madness are you speaking

Jonathan: of?

Well, it's, it's Floss Weekly and we have, we have Elliot here. We have a Hackaday person on Floss Weekly.

Elliot: Well, it's Inception because Floss Weekly is now on Hackaday.

Jonathan: It's, it's Hackaday all the way down. It is, it is. Well, today we've got a super special guest and this may explain why we've got Elliot here.

We've got Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Raspberry Pi the business. Um, pretty much just All around the Raspberry Pi guy, and, uh, sort of one of our heroes here, I think. One of mine, at least. Um, I'm not sure if I want to bug him about looking like Jason Statham. I feel like that joke has sort of run its course.

Um, he gets it a lot, I feel like. Um, Elliot, you're obviously, I'm sure you have probably 15 Raspberry Pis within arm's reach, right?

Elliot: I think 10 is probably about the right number if I'm looking around here, but it might be edge and close to 15, especially So, yeah, if we get to play Good Cop, Bad Cop, or Software Guy, Hardware Guy, I get to play Hardware Guy, and If you count the microcontrollers, if you count the recent RP2040 microcontrollers, then 15 is a ridiculous underestimate Yeah But, uh You know, just Raspberry Pi, single board Linux computers, probably a dozen, good dozen.

Jonathan: Yep. Yep. Well, let's not, uh, let's not dally anymore. We've got the man himself. Let's bring Mr. Eben Upton onto the show. Welcome, sir.

Eben: Good to be here. Now, is it, is it Eben or is it Eben? How is that? It's Eben. It's Eben. It's like Ebenezer. Okay. It's I, I'm the most miserable guy at Christmas. I'm not Ebenezer, but it's pronounced that way.

Jonathan: You're, you're, you're, you're Ebenezer. After the

Eben: story, is it? Uh, yeah, so I'm Ebenezer after a bunch of old Welsh guys. Uh, who my dad met in Wales while my mom was pregnant. So I'm, I'm, I, I have a, uh, it's a good, it's a good solid, Wales is a, so Wales is a Christian but not a Catholic country. So they want biblical names that aren't Satan's names.

And there actually aren't a huge number of those available. I imagine. And, and Ebenezer is one of them.

Jonathan: Ah, I like it actually. Um. All right, so, we're here, we're here to talk about Raspberry Pi, and normally the first question that we ask people is to give us the 30, 000 foot view, like, what is your project about, for people that don't know about it, but at this point, I don't think we have any listeners that don't know what the Raspberry Pi is, because it's, it's everywhere, and it's, it's sort of in everything, and yes, we were not kidding when we said that we have just, Pis around, from, from the one to the four, um, I've even got a Raspberry Pi 5, the newest one over there.

And let's, let's talk about that for a minute. Um, I don't know, maybe give us the quick sales pitch. What's the, what's the upgrades in the, in the Pi 5? Like, why is, why do we want to reach for that one over the Pi 4?

Eben: Well, this is, this is kind of a fun day. Almost a fun day to be talking. So, so history, history fans will, will remember that we launched the product on the 29th of February.

Um, uh, the 29th of February, 2012. Um, so, so tomorrow's our third birthday, which is super exciting. We've come a long way in three years. Um, and I guess the pitch for Raspberry Pi 5 is, I think that's how it works. I think, I think, I'm pretty sure that's, I'm pretty sure that's how it works. We

Jonathan: did math behind the camera.

Yeah, yeah,

Eben: yeah, that's it. Um, so, um, I mean, the pitch really is, is more. I mean, the interesting thing about Raspberry Pi is over the, over the kind of, the course of the kind of, the history of the Raspberry Pi single board computer. Um, uh, I guess, qualitatively, the board hasn't really changed very much, right?

It kind of does the same thing, right? It's got some memory, it's got some processing power, it's got the ability to drive a display, it's got some USB, some GPIO, Ethernet. Um, the only real, um, qualitative change to the board was in 2016 with Raspberry Pi 3 where we added wireless, right? So we added, we added Wi Fi and Bluetooth.

Um, and pretty much everything else that's happened to Raspberry Pi on the hardware side over the years has just been a question of more. Uh, and I guess Raspberry Pi 5 kind of continues that tradition of more. It's about, um, it's somewhere between, it's on the three end of, we say two to three X, the performance of a, of a Pi.

four. Uh, I think it's kind of on the three end for most, for most use cases. It's kind of on the three end of that. Um, that makes it about 100 and depending how you count, it makes about 150 times the performance of the, uh, of the 2012 of the February 29th, uh, 2012 product. Um, so it's kind of a, it's kind of a further turning up at the dial.

Um, I guess in terms of, you know, we've always seen ourselves, you know, The majority of Raspberry Pis are used in, uh, in sort of, uh, in embedded, what you consider to be embedded applications. But they're still, because of our history of trying to get young, you know, young people excited about computing, um, there's still a real, uh, real history of us seeing ourselves as a client PC company.

We've been calling ourselves a client PC company since that very first device. I guess this is the one, if you think Raspberry Pi 4 was the first device which was really credible, particularly for web browsing, was really credible as a, um, I guess, uh, uh, some compromises, um, client PC, probably at least for me, Raspberry Pi 5 is the one that pushes you over into not noticing that it isn't a regular.

that isn't a regular PC. So those, although it's a kind of this kind of continuous increase in, um, in performance over the 12 years, um, there are kind of milestones. It sort of feels there are milestones that you go past. And that's probably for me as the one where when I sit down in front of one 10 minutes later, I'm like, Oh, I'm using a Raspberry Pi.

Um, that's probably the milestone that we went past with this, with this product. Yeah.

Jonathan: I, I ran an experiment when the Pi 4 came out and used it. As my main desktop for several days, if not a week. And there were a few things that would drive you nuts about it, but for the most part, yeah, it just worked. Um, you talk about milestones, though, and there's something, there's something in the Pi 5 that I think is maybe a game changer in the same way that adding Wi Fi was, or maybe even more than that.

And that's the, uh, the exposed PCI Express port. Yeah,

Eben: I mean, that's, that, that is, you know, you're right, that is a huge change, and it is a, I guess that is a, that is a genuinely A genuinely new feature, obviously in, in the PI four generation, you could have PCR Express if you were using the, uh, we used, we had a single layer of PC Express Mm-Hmm.

That was on the SPC product. Mm-hmm. Was connected to the, uh, via labs. Um, USB, uh, X-H-C-X-H-C-I, uh, uh, controller and hub. Uh, and if you're using the compute module for, you could, uh, you would have access to that, that chip wasn't on there. You had access to PCI express, I guess the thing that's happened in the PI five generation is we have enough PCI express that we can both use it on the board.

I guess we'll talk about RP1 in a moment. Um, so we can use it on the board to, to communicate with the I O processor, but we also have a lane left over that we brought to this connector. Yeah,

Jonathan: when I first saw that, I was a little disappointed that it wasn't broken out as an NVMe. On the, on the Pi 5 itself.

I think I've kind of warmed up to your approach, because it does give a little bit more flexibility.

Eben: But, what was the, what's the reason? Yeah, and the nice thing is, is, is, you know, you talk about flexibility, there is that sort of feeling that, you know, we haven't got our first party, there will be a first party adapter board that we trailed.

Um, uh, fairly, fairly soon. We haven't got ours in the market yet. But there's a bunch of other people, and what's interesting about the other people's is, yeah, all of these different, some people have made ones that go underneath. Some people have made ones that go on top. I saw some people who've made one that will take two, has two M2 sockets on, so you can, so you can raid, and it has a, um, a switch, has a PCI Express switch on there, and you can raid, raid a couple of devices together.

Um, so there's, so it's interesting that, that there is some Yeah, it happens all the time with the Bury power route. We, we try to do the, kind of the minimum. We try to do the kind of the core product, the thing where we think we, we add some value. Um, and then you see the, the community, the ecosystem, the business and enthusiast ecosystem around the product kind of go and then explore what can be done with Mm-Hmm, with the features we provided.

Yeah.

Jonathan: That is, that is. Super interesting stuff and I'm hoping we get to talk a little bit more about that the third party stuff But there's there's there's a pair of questions that I really want to get in and I'll hand it over to Elliot Let him ask some but let's talk about the the so I've got a cm4 here I understand the cm5 is coming which I'm excited about that.

Yeah And then what I've not heard about is, is there a Pi 500 coming? And please tell me that it's got an NVMe port in it.

Eben: Um, so I, um, let's see, we don't talk about unannounced products. Of course we do talk a little bit about unannounced products in this generation. Um, I think the, I think what we all say, I don't know if you've read, there's a book by Neil Stevenson called Cryptonomicon.

Um, uh, in which, you know, somebody challenges the hero about, I think they're laying fiber optic in the Philippines. Uh, uh, and, and she says to, she says to me, you're gonna do, you gotta more fiber optic in the Philippines. And he says, well, people in business seldom plan to do something once because it messes up the spreadsheets

Um, and I, I wouldn't wanna mess up the spreadsheets. So I think, you know, there are, you know, obviously, you know, we, uh, PI 400 has been a really. It's been a, it's been a really successful product for us, actually. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's probably the clearest, um, it's the clearest hardware instantiation.

If you think of all the investments we've made in Raspberry Pi OS as being the kind of software instantiation of our belief that we are a client. PC. Um, actually going and building something which is unambiguously a PC and a keyboard, unambiguously a client PC. That's the kind of hardware instantiation of that feeling that we have about ourselves.

Um, and, and so I think it would be surprising if we didn't, we still feel that way. So it'd be surprising if we didn't try and do something in that space at some point.

Jonathan: So I've got my Pi 400 here, which happens to have this little cyber deck attachment from Adafruit, which is great. Um, So two things about this, if I, if I, since I have you here, if I were to give you a wishlist for the Pi 500, and of course, I'm sure you have a lot of people that ask you.

Let me get a pen. Okay. It's only, it's only two things. It's only two things. First off, I would love to see a real NVMe port on it somewhere because running SD card is just a painful experience. And two,

Eben: I would love. Depends on the, depends on the SD card, but yes. They're not all created equal, but yes. I've bought the ones that are

Jonathan: supposed to be nice and still it can be a painful experience.

And then two, so many people do stuff like build cyberdecks out of them. I would love to see some built in mounting options, like maybe a VESA mount on the bottom, or some threaded inserts on the back of it, so that you can hang hardware off of it and be a little less janky. Um, so those are, those are my two wishlist items for the PI 500.

Eben: Well, I I've taken a, I've taken an, I've taken a virtual, I've taken, I can, I do still just about have a functioning memory, medium term memory. Um, so I don't know that. I mean, that's, you know, that's good input. And certainly the NVMe thing, you know, the, the. presence of that PCI express lane is a really, it's a really important part of the platform.

And it's something that obviously will be exposed on, um, uh, on CM five. We we've, we've released some forward guides. Well, we don't talk about future products for CM five. Obviously we've wanted to, you know, because of the lead times associated with particularly, when people are designing baseboards, one of the, the, the, um, the sort of direction of thinking was, well, people are designing CM4 based products all the time.

Uh, and if we know some stuff about what CM5 is going to be like, and it is going to be very much like CM4, but you know, there are always changes from generation to generation. We should totally write those things down because it could be that 10 minutes of work from somebody today will mean that they had, they designed a product that you can drop a.

Yeah. Um, that you can drop a, uh, a CM5 into, uh, rather than having to spin a PCB. So there's a, if you go to the, the product information portal PIP, um, there's a, there's what we call CM5 forward guidance, which is really kind of notes for CM4 baseboard designers to maximize compatibility. Sure.

Elliot: Cool. Yeah.

Speaking of CM4 and CM5 and the fours and the fives, one of the things I noticed When I started playing around with my five was that it kind of does need the fan And that's just I guess a consequence of well, it doesn't need it And this is something actually that I've always loved about Raspberry Pi You can

Eben: run them quite good at not melting and the

Elliot: and the old four the four and the cm4 I Played around overclocking them And, you know, you can do stupid things, like overclock it with extra voltage and no cooling whatsoever, and the thing just throttles itself down.

It doesn't burn up, nothing bad happens, but as long as it can run, it does run. And you throw a tiny bit of aluminum on it, and then it runs

Eben: beautifully. I mean, that's the, that's the interesting thing, because they're fully throttled. Yeah, Pi 5 is so much faster than Pi 4. They're fully throttled. Pi 5 is a lot faster than a heavily overclocked Pi 4, right?

Exactly, it still runs, yeah. And so, so my daughter, I have a six year old daughter, and her first PC is a Raspberry Pi 5 on her, on her desk in her bedroom. Um, and because I'm a lazy dad, I haven't actually got around to fitting a case or an active cooling. It's just been sat there on the sides for the last, like, 12 weeks.

Um, and, and she doesn't notice. And honestly, I mean, she doesn't put a finger on it. But, um, uh, but you know, she, she doesn't notice. Um, she did pile a bunch of clothes on top of it the other day. Um, uh, I'm looking at thinking, you know, I am glad that we made those investments in the, in the thermal throttling software.

Um, but, uh, but you know, it is a, it is a platform which is designed, when people say, uh, uh, you know, obviously the platform performs better if you, if you want to run it under heavy load, you want to cool it because it'll stop it from throttling. But there is this, I probably, I have this, When people say, there's a problem with Raspberry Pi because it gets hot.

That's not quite right, but it's designed to get hot because that's how thermodynamics works, where you get there's no way to pack so many

Elliot: gates into such a small space without

Eben: it getting warm. Yes, the way thermodynamics works is you can only shed heat to your environment if you're hotter than your environment.

Um, and so this is a, you know, people and people say, oh, the CPU has got up to 80 degrees. Well, 80 degrees is broadly nothing by silicon standard. So the silicon is closed to 125. Right. Um, the, the PMIC I think out, the, the PMIC probably out to 150 degrees, certainly the core logic to, to about 125. So you're not even beginning to explore the edges of the operating regime of the design at 80 odd degrees.

It's really about, it's really about finger safety. It's really about, about not getting so hot that you can't put your finger on it and then get your finger off it before you burn yourself. Right.

Elliot: And we were talking also about the Pi 400. I love your idea, Jonathan, of putting VESA mounts on it, because I actually use, I've, we have two Pi 400s in the house.

One is my son's first computer. So mission accomplished. That worked out very well. My wife actually bought it for him without even consulting me. I thought that was kind of sweet. The other one is in the basement driving my CNC machine. And. They're perfect for that too. It's again, it's kind of light duty work But then I can fire up a browser and download stuff and absolutely beautiful for that sort of application Except it's just sitting there on the desk and it would be so awesome if it had screws on the back but now that you mention it john then i'm just gonna Make a little base plate for it and glue something

Eben: to it.

That's where would you put the screws? Would you put the screws in the back or would you put the screws in the base? I guess it's honestly I'd

Jonathan: love to see both So my my

Eben: thought was that so I saw it so I know how much threaded inserts cost So I'm gonna ask you to pick one.

Elliot: I put the threaded inserts in the in the red underbelly in the raspberry colored underbelly I would 4.

Jonathan: I would say whichever is easier because people can make it work either way so one of the one of the things that I'm thinking of is like you can then put a you get by a by a little LCD from Waveshare and Put it on there make it hinged and make your own little tiny laptop out of a Raspberry Pi 500 And you can make that work from either place So I guess probably the bottom is where it would make most sense Um, to be more

Eben: mechanical, more mechanical strength to play with.

Right, right. Probably in terms of the layout. Interesting. Okay. Look, that's great input. And I will go and have a chat with, I'm going to have a chat with people and if and when we decide to do a PI 500, that's, that's, that's a useful, useful bit of data.

Jonathan: Non binding suggestion,

Eben: but I like I mean, I'll be disappointed.

I'm not sure I signed anything before this If I have signed up to implement anything you tell me then I will Board of directors will be a little bit disappointed with me I think the

Elliot: other thing that especially has been hitting hackaday has been the RP 2040 and You know, so, I see Raspberry Pi moving in these kind of two different directions at the same time.

There's the obvious evolution, like you say, of the, of the single board computer version. But then kind of out of left field comes this, uh, microprocessor, this microcontroller with just, from, from my perspective, absolutely stunning, unique, and interesting peripheral set. Um, and I actually used it on our badge for the Hackaday super conference and I made extensive use of the PIOs and the DMA stuff and made this crazy like six stage pipeline of one PIO feeding into the other and I actually did like decimation and bit flipping and stuff in it and it was tremendously useful for, you know, things you'd otherwise use programmable logic for.

Eben: I love that somebody, somebody built a pro. It's two favorites. One, somebody did a, I think a Commodore 64, um, external cartridge, um, uh, which, which had no CPU. Both WFI. Um, and, and it was doing all of the, you know, grabbing the, uh, you know, grabbing the two phases of the, grabbing the two phases of the address, getting, you know, going and doing the data fetch from memory, um, you know, effectively DMAing.

Aggregating them. DM aing them out into a DMA control block, triggering that DMA to go get the data from a 16 k line, bit of memory inside the device, then in presenting it on the bus and the whole thing was done using this, this kind of inter interlocking set of DMA of DMA engines and of PIO state machines.

Yeah. Um, which is kind of, it's kind of fun. And then somebody obviously inevitably did a processor with it. I think I, I remember that writeup of someone managed to do a kind of. AVR rate level of performance, uh, kind of a processor, which was just built out of, uh, of DMA training.

Elliot: Oh, fun. Yeah. I mean, for our application, it was superb because it did all the like high bandwidth stuff for us.

And then we had both cores free for people to play around with. And one of them was running kind of system stuff and the whole other core was just like here. You, you write your code on it, people at the conference, go have fun and that was a beautiful separation and

Eben: it was just lovely. Yeah, and if you, if you sort of think, I mean, you know where, so Raspberry Pi kind of comes from originally from this kind of, it does come from an AVR8 world, right?

So the first things I built in 2006 were kind of, um, can I build an 8 bit computer, an 8 bit equivalent level of performance with, um, Um, just with an AVR8 and a bit of SRAM, uh, and you know, can I, can I generate video addresses and can I, you know, it's kind of built this whole world on this piece of error board, right?

Um, and then this was sort of, I'd spent probably a year, six months maybe, uh, after the end of my PhD, just kind of, I was kind of burnt out, kind of just futzing about with, um, with AVR8. And it's a great architecture, right? Because it's very, it's, it's got high level of performance for the. for the price for the time and for the price it has.

Um, it has very determined. It has very low latency access to the real world from code. Um, and so there's always that sort of feeling that I could go and buy an and gate, uh, or I could just program an 80 tiny to read two pins and them together and then out them to another pin, you know, so not about and gate actually.

Um, so you've kind of got that kind of very. Low latency access, um, to the outside world. You also have very deterministic, um, access to the outside world. So you actually can cycle cam. So I, my toy was generating video signals and generating video signals out of an AVR is kind of a popular, a popular hobby.

Right. Um, and so really when you look at RP2040, what's the genesis of RP2040? It's like, well, Um, can we recreate some of that immediacy and determinism and high performance interfacing in a 32, in a modern 32 bit environment, in an ARM based 32 bit environment? And so you think, okay, well, well, okay, let's, let's put a M0, let's put M0 plus down and let's connect it at low latency, use the SIOB, um, to connect it at low latency to the GPIOs.

Okay, that's quite nice. It's quite a nice thing. Well, um, but one of the things that sucked when you were doing this AVR, well, it was very informed by the 2006 Raspberry Pi, actually. One of the things that sucked was that you would only do your, run your application code in H blank and V blank. Um, and you'd, you'd be there all the time in, in, uh, during the the display period, just generally video addresses.

So well, okay, perhaps I'll put another call down. That could be the application is back to your idea of having one call running. infrastructure maintenance stuff and one core running, uh, running application codes. Let's have an application core and let's have this go. Well, okay. But they're going to contend if they're both addressing the same memory inside the chip, they're going to contend.

So let's put a bunch of different banks in a bunch of let's split our SRAM on the chip into a bunch of different banks and let's put a crossbar between them so that you can, the two, as long as you're not addressing the same bit of SRAM, then you, the two. The two concurrent run concurrently. And so that's kind of like, that's the overall structure, two processes, um, uh, fab, um, multi ported, uh, multi ported sram, and then fully connected crossbar in the middle.

And, and that's an enormous amount of bandwidth actually. You, you add up all the bandwidth things like the chip, there's almost as much bandwidth inside an RP 2040 as there is an A 28 35 as there is in the original. Raspberry Pi application processor. And this is kind of a bunch of application processor guys came rocked up and designed a microcontroller, right?

Um, and then the PIO is the last bit where you say, Oh, it's a bit of a waste of an M zero plus to be bit banging a UART, isn't it? Um, I wonder if we could make a magic and of course Everybody, perennially, and this must have happened a thousand times in the history of, uh, of, of computing, computing hardware.

Everyone tries to design, oh, that machine that could be a SPI or a UART. Um, but the interesting thing about PIO is because we had so many people work on it over such a long period of time, and they were all bringing their own contributions to hardware people, software people. What you ended up with was something which is incredibly abstract and flexible, um, and had been used in house to do probably 10 or 15 protocols before it went out in the world.

And then, um, And it went out in the world and it had been used to do DVI. Um, it had been used to do DVI inside the organization. Um, but the, the, the, the moment I knew that we had something special with PIO is about a week after launch, someone took the DVI example where, you know, DVI is differential. Um, so there's a piece of software that occupied most of an M zero plus.

Um, that, um, uh, converted, basically just bit doubled, just converted 0 to 1, 0. Um, and, um, someone took the example and said, yeah, but you guys have got this thing, there's a feature called sideset in PIO which lets you set some pins. In addition to pushing data out, you can also just set some pins. Um, and what they said, well, you've got zero latency branching.

Um, and you've got sideset. So he said, you can just have a two line program, which does, does an out. Um, it does, uh, it does, uh, it does a branch. It does a computed branch. It consumes one bit from the input bit stream. Does a computer branch with your instruction zero instruction one. Um, and then the first instrument, they're both jumping, they're both computer branch instructions.

And the first one has a side set of zero one. And the second one has a side set of one zero. So the program is just lashing backwards and forwards between the two and all of the work is done by the side set. And that was the point where I'm like, this is not something we thought of doing. And yet someone has found a material improvement to our, what we thought was a pretty cool example, right?

Um, someone's found a material improvement to it. So, so PIO, PIO, we quite, we quite love PIO actually. I did

Elliot: this, I, I did this I2S thing with the clocks as well and, you know, there you need a really high speed clock and then you need two other clocks that are divisions of it and the sideset pins are absolutely perfect for that to shove data along through on these clock timings.

It was, yeah, it was a piece of cake. I mean, it took, it took me, Oh, it took me a few days to get my head around the assembly language, which is really neat and interesting and very compact and but also very powerful once you see a few examples and um, A lot of people have worked, got good, worked examples out on the internet, and I, I custom cobbled together an I two s thing that actually worked.

Eben: Yeah. And there were some, and you know, there, there are, there are some wonderful examples of, I mean, for me, 6 5 0 2 assembly language. I, yeah, I, I I entered your one K contest. I, I, I, it's, uh, I, I, I, I, you know, I love these, I love these, um, probably 6, 5, 2, 7 language, actually, the, the shader. Uh, processor instruction set for video core four, uh, which I designed, uh, and have written some substantial programs in, um, uh, and also the other one I really enjoy is Pentium.

One. Um, it's Pentium one UV, UV pipelining where you have the, you have the, or you have, it's super scalar, but in a very, it's kind of a very fixed super scalar where you have two pipes execute synchronously with each other. Um, and they're all examples that in PIO code, they're all examples of places where you kind of put in effort and get Rewards, cause it's a little serotonin, little serotonin cookies.

Um, 6502 is great for this. I mean, you literally will look at, um, I used to, I had the privilege of working with Sophie Wilson at Broadcom for a long time, who, who wrote BBC Basic and then designed the original arm, Instructions and Architecture. Um, and the story was with her. BBC basic ROM, there would be one 16k ROM and there'd be one byte left and someone would report a bug to her and she would work all day and at the end of it she'd fix the bug and there'd be one byte left.

Um, and, and, and, and it's just that anything that gives you those, you sit there for half an hour, ah, a byte, serotonin. Um, I just love it. And PIOs like that. It's wonderful to have made. A thing, or to have been around, actually, while such a thing was made, I think would be a fairer, a fairer attribution of credit.

Jonathan: So, it seems like this would be a good place to talk about the other sort of PIO solution, the RP 1. Kind of a, kind of a big milestone, I think, for Raspberry Pi. And, boy, an interesting little chip. Let's chat about the RP 1 for a minute.

Eben: It's, it's fun, right? So this is a, uh, so for the first time we have a big raspberry pi, so, uh, for the first time we have a big, um, raspberry pi, uh, with, uh, Some Raspberry Pi silicon on it.

Uh, this is RP1. The clue, in terms of you think about how long these programs have been going on for, the clue's in the name. When, when we brought RP2040 out, it says RP2 on the box, and people thought that meant we're short for RP2040. It's not, it's the second, it's the second chip. Uh, so this only took four, RP2040 only took two, only took four years.

Um, um, uh, RP1 took, took eight. Um, uh, and really, you know, what's the concept here? It's that you can Uh, you, you know, if you want to keep making Raspberry Pi faster, um, you have to go down Process Node. Um, and the problem with going down Process Node, of course, is that, is that your analog interfacing is basically big power transistors.

Um, and they don't scale very well. A, they don't scale very well. B, they're a pain in the neck. On any process node, it's a burden. So you have this big burden of I. O. Particularly like the MIPI I. O., for example. Um, that you, you, you, you drag down. You know, making 3v3, nice ESD tolerance, 3v3 GPIO patch, things like this.

You have, you have this burden that you drag after you as you go down process node. And so the kind of idea is, well, what if we took all of that interfacing, analog stuff, put it on a friendly old process node. And 40 is just the, I love 40 nanometers. It's, TSMC40LP is just the friendly, it's like a warm bath of a process.

And it yields so well. I remember the first chip I ever did on 40 nanometers yielded 1%. Test chips all day, you get one, two, two. If you, if you test them quickly, you get two chips, uh, two working chips at the end of the day. But like, right, right now that was 22, that's 2009. So we're 15 years later. This thing's like a warm bath.

So let's just do all of our analog on this lovely old process node with our friends at TSMC. Um, and then let's connect them by PCI express to the, um, uh, to, to, to a core logic chip. Uh, and then, then that core logic chip can run down the process. So in this case, you know, Broadcom did us a chip on 16, which is, which is lovely.

Um, and it's a. I mean, what this is is a chiplet architecture, right? We've been doing this for long enough that it predates the word, the word, the word chiplet. But what you call it today, usually with a fancier interconnect. I mean, the interesting thing about chiplets is usually, usually people out use some chiplet specific low energy pipette interconnect.

But this is basically a chiplet. And the advantage of using a standards based chiplet interface is that you can build the two chips in different organizations. That you, you know, we just agree. So we had uh, RP1s plugged into x86 PCs. So I have PCI Express card with, with a RP1 on. And so you could do all your development against 2711 or against a Xeon, a shiny, shiny Xeon.

Um, and then I know it'll work. And then at the other end, of course, you've got a program developing 2712. Um, and then you can just say, well, look, we're just going to make a standards compliant PCI Express interface. And we know that your standards compliant PCI Express device will plug into it and work.

And it did. Yes, so,

Jonathan: are the, can people buy RP1s by themselves? Like, is that a thing that's out there

Eben: anywhere? It's not a thing at the moment. I think we've not decided. There's quite a burden associated with selling a chip. I think if you look at the amount of documentation that went into RP2040. Um, there's a sort of a different level of collateral that needs to surround a device you're going to sell versus a device you're just going to use yourself.

So I think it's probably, in terms of broad market, do I think you'll end up in the broad market? I don't know. I suspect kind of narrow, there's a difference between broad market and sometimes in the chip industry, we call this white, white glove. Um, where you have, um, you have, if you have high volume, um, customers, a small number of high volume customers, uh, and you know, big, big mainline, most big like mainline semiconductor companies like this, right?

They have fairly small numbers of fairly large customers. And what you do there is, is you can not generate so much collateral, but apply engineering effort to white glove, give people a white glove service to kind of help them through the process of designing. It's possible RP1 might show up in a white glove.

Uh, kind of, kind of business model, whether we are resourced really to, to, to, to, to, to support it as a general product, I don't, I don't know. I've heard enough

Elliot: hackers thinking about hot airing them off of existing boards, so I don't, you know, you can either Cater to our market or not people know what they're

Eben: doing.

I mean, honestly, honestly, I am aware of you know we obviously we've had some inbound inquiries and I you know, I'm aware of somebody who's wanting to use it to replace a 300 FPGA in a design right and so at that point Yeah, maybe you should be hot, uh, maybe you should be hot air gunning, maybe you should be buying 60 Raspberry Pi 5s and hot air gunning the, uh, hot air gunning the RP 1 off them, right?

Jonathan: Oh, that's fun. I, you know, it's, it's, the thing that's most intriguing to me, actually, is that idea of a PCI Express car that you can slap in your x86 and have all of that juicy input and output. I mean, it's, it is non trivial to get. I2C and SPI exposed on an x86 machine. There's a couple of little USB dongles that will do it, but the driver support is terrible.

Eben: Yeah. And the latency is what's really interesting is, is how quickly you could bit bang. So we had somebody for, uh, we are working on, um, we had somebody, um, bit bang. Um, Something a bit iTunes, uh, no, just sort of like random, just random serial protocol, um, out of the PCI express, out of the, out of a GPIO over, PCI Express from the ARM core, and they were able to get, you know, sort of five megabits.

So it's interesting that you really can, you know, it's not quite the immediacy of the GPIOs that are on, sort of, think of a hierarchy. The GPIOs that are on RP2040 are literally one cycle away from the processor core. The, the, the GPIOs that are in 2708, 2711, the, the monolithic historical Um, Raspberry Pi parts are a few, you know, ten ish cycles away from the core.

Um, these are a lot further away from the core than that, but not as far as you might think, actually, and it would be kind of fun to see, you know, how, what could you bitbash from your Xeon. Processor for your PCI Express card plugged into the backplane. Yeah,

Jonathan: I'm actually working on another open source project, MeshTastic, and it's all about LoRa radios, and of course we talk to those over SPI, and one of the things that I've been doing is making because it runs generally on embedded hardware, and I've been working on making it work with mainstream Linux and trying to make SPI play with a desktop is just a pain.

And so, it's

Eben: actually very different worlds. They're very different worlds. The X86 Linux world and the most of the ARM Linux world are actually quite different, actually. Um, so, yeah, it would be a fun thing and it's a, it's a It's, they're objects that exist. And there's always that question, it's always about resource.

It's always about customer, the number of people you help. Because there's opportunity cost, right? We can't do everything. And the question is, How many people are going to be, how many people are going to be delighted by our PCI Express card? If it's thousands, hmm, if it's tenths of thousands, then, you know, then, then that's a, then that's a very different, that's a very different proposition.

So, so, it's probably, it's probably something for, You know, as we're now getting to a point where Raspberry Pi 5 is pretty well ramped, the production rate is pretty well ramped, we can have a little bit of a think about what else we could be doing.

Elliot: Cool. And mentioning documentation, like, the support that you would have to do to put the RP1 out there as a product.

I have to say that one of the things that, uh, you know, in the hacker community we most appreciate about Actually, all of the Raspberry Pi products is the outstanding documentation and educational resources and the operating system compatibility with the single board computers. All of this makes for a very pleasant, easy to get into kind of environment.

And that You know, you would want that to be there. I understand that you would want that to be there for the RTP.

Eben: People focus a lot on the hardware with Rails 3. 5, but you've got to remember the collateral. Yeah, we have more software engineers in this building than we have hardware, than we have certainly board level hardware engineers.

ASIC engineers, actually, we've got quite a lot of those. But, um, the, um, uh, the, the, you know, it is, you know, all hardware companies are really software companies. All ones that make hardware you might want. Uh, I'll, I'll, I'll release off our companies. Um, and certainly that. You know, I'm the guy who has the Raspberry Pi One on my desk and a new operating system release will come to me and I will be the person who boots it up, waits two minutes, uh, boots it up on my Raspberry Pi One, my, my, my 256 meg Raspberry Pi One and then, you know, just then, you know, types top because I want to know how much memory I've got left out of my 256 meg, um, and then waggles the, waggles the, waggles the window.

And You know, it picks a window up and waggles it. And it's like, mmm, waggling's got a bit, lads, waggling's got a bit slow. You'll see it anyway. That's what, what, what technically it used to be. Used to be six, five, or two assembly language. Now it's waggling a window. But we still make technical contributions, even though we are the chief executives.

Yeah. Well, who, you know,

Elliot: who is your end user experience at the end of the day? Right? It's, it's window wagglers. And that's super

Eben: important. Yeah. And it's, yeah, that's it. And, and, and who's our, I mean, it's really important about the end user experience. Who is the end user? People like us. Yep. Uh, one way or another.

And it could be, it could be adult. Enthusiasts, because we're all enthusiastic about the pupils, right? That's why we're here. Um, so it could be adult enthusiasts. It could be professional design engineers, because of course we're all professional design engineers. It could be a child who is like I was when I was 10 years old, right?

But it depends what stage of your life you're at. But, you know, there's, there's, there's a view of the other fruit company, um, in its glory days. Um, as, as being a company that made the products Steve wanted. Um, and it just, and that's all it did. Um, and it just turned out the most, not without AppleCube, not without failures, but, um, uh, you know, by and large, there were a lot of other people who wanted the product Steve wanted.

Um, and that's, uh, you contrast that with the kind of, um, uh, focus groupie kind of, like, could you have focus grouped the iPad into existence? Yeah, I don't think you could, right? Um, you just had to be con Could you really focus group the Raspberry Pi into existence? You just gotta, you, you, you You gotta have some conviction that this is a thing that at least one person The nice thing about, about conviction products like the iPad, is you know at least one person wants it.

Because he's the guy who commissioned it. Um, uh, and, and the problem with focus grouping things, with trying to kind of do market research based product design, is that you, you expose the possibility that zero people want your product. Um, uh, and that does happen, right? Um, So, so that's how we've always approached it.

We, and, and so that comes with then the, the obligation to have, well, what would I have found frustrating when I was 10 years old? Well, if I'd had to patch, if I'd had to cobble my operating system together by applying a hundred patches to something, um, and then the documentation was wrong, I would have found that frustrating.

Uh, if I was a professional design engineer and I was trying to design a product into something and I couldn't find out how much RF it was supposed to be radiating and I couldn't understand when I put it in the test chamber Why it radiated too much RF and I couldn't get my FCC Um certification I find that frustrating.

So it's all all of this stuff has come from Experiences, good and bad that not just me, but you know, on our hundred and we've got 60 odd engineers in the building, a hundred and some total employees that it all comes from experiences. Those people have had.

Elliot: And maybe then this is a good time to bring up the IPO because, because what, because what that does is that gives you guys a lot more money to play with.

And I think the question would be, and I think. A lot of the community's looking at this thing. Is this going to go into More hardware. Is this going to go into more software? Is this going to go into more accessibility? Where is it all going to

Eben: go? So so I should probably read for my piece of paper Virtual piece of paper things I things I say about the idea.

Um, yeah I mean, this is somewhere where you know, everyone knows that we had a look at this a couple years ago and We didn't like it for a couple of reasons. One of them was obviously the market the other was the business You know that the shortages made it very hard the business actually performed financially okay.

Um, but, but from the market's perspective, it became very unpredictable and kind of markets like predictability, almost like they'd rather have a predictable bad number. Sometimes you think than a, than a, than an unpredictable number that turned out to be good. Right. So, so there were reasons not to do it.

Um, we've turned our attention back to it. We don't have a schedule for this. We have appointed bankers to, to, to help us, uh, think about it. We don't have a schedule for it. I think what we said is when the market's ready. We want to be ready because you can't wait until the, if he's waiting until the market's ready and then start running.

If the wait till the windows open and you start running, it's going to shut and you're going to smack into the window again. So, so, so I think that's where we are at the moment in terms of, I mean, I guess a couple of things, um, think of it as a way for the foundation, which is our shareholder. So what are we, what are we talking?

What would we be doing? We have a foundation that owns. a regular commercial company. That's what I run, a regular commercial company. Um, the foundation would sell some of its stake in the company to raise the money. Um, why is that exciting? Because it lets the foundation continue to do. We've returned about 50 million to the foundation over the, over the first decade.

Um, uh, and it lets, it would let the foundation continue to do stuff for a long time, potentially do stuff at larger scale. than it does. So that's kind of the, that's the, that would be the rationale if we were going to do this. Um, I think the I think there's a, there's an understandable concern that we will become somehow the Borg.

Oh, wait, if we were to do this, then we would become, that we would become kind of some sort of, some sort of abstract schematic, um, uh, profit maximizing, uh, um, group of, uh, of, of, of, of, of, of people, biomechanical people, with little green lasers. Um, uh, I think the important thing to emphasize is that, um, well, that would be a really done thing to do.

I mean, it's such a stupid thing to do. Um, the, you know, it was, this is not, um, you know, this is an organization that has grown, uh, by giving people things that they like. Um, and it's given people, and as I said before, it's given people things they like by building the things we would like. Um, and there's no obvious reason for us to stop doing that.

Um, part of things that one likes, uh, is, say, the pricing. So people, uh, have used the word, uh, people, I've seen the word, Slightly rude word, I suppose, and shitification, um, uh, used, which I think probably either implies that people think that we're going to put the price up, or we're going to put the quality down.

Um, and of course Well, we've built a business by building things which are low cost and really good. So, why would we want to blow that business up by, by doing something different? So, I think the, I think the, there's no obvious incentive. We've always been incentivized to make money in Raspberry Pi because we fund a charity that goes out and teaches hundreds of thousands of children how to code.

Of course we're incentivized to make money. Then we could be incentivized to make money. Um, after an IPO, because you know, I would imagine the foundation probably continue on quite a lot of the business. Um, sure. You've got financial shareholders, financial shareholders now. Um, so, so I think the, I think people, I think the way I'd encourage people to think about it is, is in terms of incentives that nothing is going to happen that's going to change the incentives on us.

Um, and if nothing happens, that's going to change the incentives on us. I, I, I struggled to see how we would do something. Why we ended up doing different things in response to the same incentives, but the other ones wait and see, you know, um, wait five years You know if we've if we've made the product Plus five times as much and that's half the performance in five years time then, you know I'll take you out and buy you a beer and you were right I think my beer is fairly my beer is fairly safe.

Yeah,

Elliot: I don't think I don't think I was suggesting it and I do

Eben: I know you won't, but I'm replying to a, I'm replying to kind of like a stock, a stock internet comment. Um, you know, and by and large I've been super excited, I've been super pleased by how The vast majority of the community really understands what's going on here and understands what the motivations are and that they're good motivations Um, and it's just probably just that one little Strand of thought that I probably want to want to perhaps push back

Jonathan: on a little bit And even that you kind of have to keep in mind that that's just a sign that People love what you guys do and they love your products and they're passionate about it.

And there's a little bit of fear when you hear that somebody's going public. And you don't necessarily understand

Eben: all of that. Yeah. And of course, you know, it is a, it is an unusual organizational structure. Um, uh, it is an, it's an unusual organizational structure. So, so I think the, uh, so I think, you know, it's something we're, it's something we're looking at.

Um, I think if we did it, it would be a good thing. Um, and, um, You know, what the wonderful thing is, like, what was the narrow thing we were trying to accomplish with Raspberry Pi, right? We wanted to get people to apply to study computer science at the University of Cambridge. It was that parochial and that narrow.

And in 2008, when we started this, the easiest way to get your child into the University of Cambridge was to get them to apply to study computer science, because it was, it was roughly a 2 to 1 application ratio, which is nuts for a university. It's Turing's university, right? 2 to 1 application ratio. Um, Last year, I think it was an 18 to 1 application ratio.

It's become the hardest subject to get into. Computer science at Cambridge is the hardest subject to get into at either Oxford or Cambridge. And that's not all us, right? That's not, that's, we just, we did this thing. But we were part of a movement. That did that, you know, people founding club networks and people lobbying the government to change the curriculum and lobbying the government to spend money on teacher training and all of these things, right?

That's the legacy, that's what that 50 million dollars, our share of that success was bought by the 50 million dollars that people gave to us. For, you know, if you bought a raspberry pi in the last, in the last decade, you were part of that, right? So people gave us that money. We gave that money. We paid that money up to the foundation.

The foundation has done that work. And so that's why i'm excited about the prospect of an IPO because it secures it Right, it secures at least another decade of impact I would think um for an organization that probably With the best, you know the foundation look we do the engineering is great but when i'm When I'm old and grey, I mean, I'm not exactly young anymore.

I got an MIT 35 under 35 award when I went to MIT Tech Review 35 under 35 award when I started this thing. Um, so I'm not as young as I was, but when I'm old and grey, I, you know, this is the thing I will look back on with pride is most pride is the, that impact on young people's education. And that's the thing that we'd be talking about securing.

Elliot: That's fantastic. So my question was going to be hardware or software or, or documentation and your answer was foundation. So,

Eben: yeah, yeah. And, and because of course I'm, I'm recovering while I'm recovering engineer sadly, but I'm recovering software engineer. I'm a software engineer turned chip designer turned, uh, business dude.

Um, so, so, uh, I've done them, I've done them all. And. I do love the chips though, because it's gambling, right? You know, I don't gamble. Um, I was in Nevada until the weekend and I was staying in a casino and I don't gamble. I stay in a casino because the hotel rooms are cheap. Um, and I, but it is high stakes gambling, right?

You spend about a million dollars on a, on a, you know, you're not far off a million dollars out of pocket when you tape out. Even this 40 nanometers, right? 15 year old process node. Not far off a million dollars to tape out. Um, and then you wait. And you wait, and you wait. And you, sometimes you've, I've had I've had, I mean, sometimes you say, maybe get, you know, you've got however many million gates, and maybe what you get back is a diode.

Uh, I did have one that came back, and it was a zero ohm link. Um, so I had 27 10 when it came back. So that's 2837, the chip that's in, uh, the SymPy3. Uh, it came back as a zero ohm link and it was a zero ohm link because the, the, the die has alternating power and ground pads around the outside. Those are bonded down onto the substrate inside the BGA and then, and then out to balls.

And at some point in going around the package, someone had lost track, had, had had off by one error and had lost track of which ones were power and which ones were ground. And the, the, the consequence was that half of the power, half the Power balls were bonded to the ground plane. Half the ground balls were bonded to the power plane.

The thing was a zero ohm link. Um, so, so sometimes, and the nice thing about that is it's a packaging problem, not a, not a, not a wafer problem. But, but you know, it's, it's, it is a lot, it's a lot of, I commend it to anyone who gets a chance. And of course there are, with things like the Skyworks thing at Google, there are opportunities now to go do little chips.

Um, kind of if you, if you have an opportunity, you and your friends at college or something, have an opportunity to go. Tape out anything. Go do it, because these are the most, it's the bleeding edge of what, of what humankind knows how to do. Um, and it's, it's still wonderful to be involved with.

Jonathan: So I want to jump in real quick because I promised David Toth that I would, um, we had him last week or the week before and he brought up when we talked a little bit about the Raspberry Pi IPO that might happen and he brought up what happened with the Red Hat IPO and he made the point that when Red Hat went public, they gave shares away to some of their contributors and he said, He thought that was the neatest thing and as far as he was could tell that they were the only big company that had ever done that.

And uh, he wanted to make a plug that it would be, it would be nice if when Raspberry Pi goes public, that uh, there would be some remembrance for the open source folks that have helped them

Eben: get there. That's, I mean, that's it. So this is a, so this is an interesting, this is an interesting, and of course you see this with Reddit.

So you see, um, Not giving away, but giving, giving people the opportunity to, people with high karma, um, uh, and long moderation histories, uh, the, the chance to participate. Sure. Um, so, so I think we're some distance away from that. I think, I think giving away, and so what they are effectively saying is we're going, we are anticipating, I think, As I understand it, what they're saying is we're anticipating an IPO pop at Reddit, and therefore what we're giving away is your chance to participate in the IPO pop.

Um, so that's, which is an interesting, it's an interesting way, it's an intermediate way of thinking about it, I guess, in between giving, giving stuff away. Um, I think we're a way away from The deal structure. This is all comes into the heading deal structure. Um, and, and there are, and, and so I probably wouldn't speculate.

I wouldn't speculate even on whether it's feasible to do. What is what the, the, the, the Reddit thing is, I think. Broadly comes under the heading retail offer. It's a fancy retail offer, you know, the ability for ordinary human beings to participate at an IPO. Um, so I wouldn't speculate on whether a retail offer is, it would be feasible in an IPO.

It's a deal structure and I can't really talk about it. Sure, sure. Um, the, the, the giving away thing is interesting. It, it, it sort of, there is a, there's a question there about what. Who to? Um, because in the end you need a, you need a metric. Right. Um, and I will go and look at what Red Hat did because you need a metric.

Um, and it's um I'll go and look at what they did. It must've been what Colonel contributors was it? I, you know,

Jonathan: I, I went to look for the details of that and Google, my Google flu was failing me. So we may have to go back to, to David Todd, which the buffer bloat by Buffer bloat guy, by the way. Yes. David's great.

Um, I, I may have to go back to him and get more details from him.

Eben: Yes. Um, I mean, that's a, but look, it's an interesting concept because there is always this, this sort of feeling about like, you know, where does the, um. Yeah, where does value, where does, you know, where was value generated and where does value end up?

Um, and I will go and I will go and attempt to use my Google for you to find out more

Jonathan: about that. Yeah. So one of the, one of the things that's always intrigued me about Raspberry Pis is your, your relationship with Broadcom. And there's, there's some interesting things there. All of the chips, all the CPUs have been Broadcom chips.

Um, is that Let's see, how do I want to ask this? Are we ever going to see a Raspberry Pi with a ROC chip on it? Or a Raspberry Pi with maybe a RISC V chip on it? Or is it always going to be Broadcom?

Eben: Um, I look, it's always been Broadcom 'cause it's always been the right choice, right. And, you know, I was at Broadcom when we started, when, when, when, when this, when I, when the foundation was founded, I was at Broadcom.

Um, and it's always been the, the, the, the, the right thing. And one of the reasons, of course it's always been the right thing is that there's this continuity of, uh, you know, we, you mentioned the, the back risk compatibility, right? Mm-Hmm. . And one of the things that, that, that being single vendor, um, has enabled us to do is to effectively.

Not multiply the software to continue to support we can support 2835 so the the arm 11 design that's still it's still a flagship product because it's still it's still the chip that's in zero, which is the lowest cost, which is a which is a zero. Although 0. 2. w has taken the kind of 0. w's flagship status away from it, 0 is still a flagship product.

So we can use the same software team to support all the way back, um, to, so we have a single common code base that runs on the, um, the VPU, the boot processor. Well, it was originally the multimedia processor, but increasingly it's been relegated as, as we've, you know, big software evolution in Raspberry Pi is the pushing of, is, is the arm gradually, is the moving, moving from proprietary interfaces to all the multimedia components to, um, uh, to, to, to standards based.

So, you know, all this stuff in the blob, um, uh, that, that, um, Where you now have Mazer, uh, you have Mazer driving the, the, the, um, the, the graphics, uh, um, VFL2 driving the, the video, um, components, and, um, um, KMS, um, DRM driving the, uh, Um, driving the video scan out. Um, so anyway, so that's the kind of thing that started off being quite central to the thing where its role in the system has been whittled down and down and down to a point where it might as well actually be a microcontroller in there.

You know, it doesn't do much more than that. It's just a little scalar processor we happen to have. But anyway, having a single vendor has allowed us to keep a common code base there. Um, that would be probably the biggest thing that one would be giving up. Sure. Uh, there'll be a lot of treadmill, you know, um, we have, well, we're single, we don't sell anything with single, but we're functionally single vendor for wifi as well.

We do use, um, uh, in, uh, Infineon, Cypress and Synaptics, um, parts or across the two different products, but actually kind of the same, they're both Broadcom derived. They both have come from an original set of Broadcom designs. So we actually functionally single vendor for wifi similar. similar thing, right?

When we have, you know, WPA three support, for example, which is already kind of recent thing that we're, we're, that we're adding to the platforms. You only got to do it once because you only have one vendor. Um, you know, when you find a monitor that you can't talk to because the HDMI doesn't negotiate properly, you've only got to fix it in one place.

Um, uh, and so there are particularly lightweight engineering team, right? Um, you know, everything, including the ASIC development fits into 60 or 70 people. Um, it's hard to be multi vendor for something as central to the personality of your device as the Core SOC. Sure. One

Jonathan: of the neat things about the Raspberry Pi using Broadcom parts is the Broadcom support in the mainline kernel is getting better and better.

Eben: Indeed. I mean, the, the, the, the video, well, I mean, the video call, um, the video call, we'd be love work with, um, Igalia, um, on, um, and this was originally, so, um, uh, Emma Anhalt, um, is fairly famous, major contributor, um, uh, worked for me for a while at Broadcom and kind of, kind of, uh, stood up the, the, the, the video call, the original set of, um, uh, open source.

Um, video core graphics drivers, um, uh, on the back of the documentation release that we did back in 2014. Um, and, uh, and so we now do a lot of work with Igalia, uh, she's moved on. Um, we do a lot of work with Igalia on this and it has had the side effect that it's generated a really robust set of open source drivers for, uh, particularly for the HVS, the video scanner and the video core, um, video scan out engine, um, and, um.

VideoCore 3D, which was the team I used to be on, uh, here in Cambridge. So I, I'm kind of very, very GPU kind of guy back in the day.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, I, uh, it's, it's fun, it's fun that we can now, you know, you can boot the, the Pi 4 with the mainline kernel. You can throw, you can throw Fedora on it, and generally expect that everything's gonna work, or most everything's gonna work.

Eben: And it's another one of these things where, where people, we've got to go appeal to people's, appeal, you know, why is, why was Raspberry Pi Why is Raspbian non standard? Well, it's because we have a finite amount of engineering resource. Um, you've got to believe that the direction of travel, nobody wants to Unnecessarily maintain a large body of closed source code inside the blob.

Um, you know, if you can get that out in the wild, it gets us out of the way. It means that we're not the gate to innovation. So now, you know, there's a gentleman, I think at Red Hat, who's been working on, um, OpenCL support. And OpenCL hasn't been a priority for us, you know, we haven't seen doing compute on our GPU as a priority, but he wants OpenCL.

And he's been doing OpenCL, and the documentation is there, and the code base is there that he can submit patches to, and he's been working with Agalia. Um, and so that's the price you pay, you know, people need to understand there is no incentive on us to have Close source software, it's a boat anchor, um, that we drag behind us.

Yep, yep.

Jonathan: Um, I, I feel like we could sit around and talk for another hour without any problem, but it is an hour long show and I only have commitments for you guys for about 15 more minutes. So we need to wrap. And the first question I want to ask as we wrap is, is there anything that we didn't ask about that you really wanted to let folks know

Eben: about?

Um, I, I don't, I don't think so. I think we, we covered, we covered a lot of, we covered a lot of ground. We did. I, I think probably the, I think probably the thing, I think the, the, the thing that was worth emphasizing. It's worth just touching briefly on the shortage, on the shortage environment. We had a couple of years of really rough shortage, uh, as you may have noticed.

Yes. Um, what's really lovely now is we're back in. Supply and I think probably the thing that's pleased me most given that we're coming up to our twelfth. Let's just call it our twelfth. Um, uh, the thing that's really good. There's you're probably aware of our pay locator. Um, uh, um, the the um, Oh, yes. Uh, yeah,

Jonathan: the the website that'll ding at you when when somebody has pies that you can go jump on a drive by

Eben: how green our pilot cater is on our 12th birthday and how green it is for an enormous amount of efforts happened at sony over the last eight weeks um to get us from probably a production rate of 70 000 units a week for pi just for pi 5 alone um we saw about eight nine hundred thousand unit total but about Um, you've gone from about 250, 000, uh, say a month to 350, 000 a month of Pi5 over the last eight weeks.

And what that's done is that's got you from keeping up and treading water to a point where we're actually starting to get free stock. You go on Digikey, I think that's the best part of 3, 000, um, eight gig. Um, uh, uh, pi fives on there and that's just, it's, it's just a, Oh God, it hurts so much. Um, and, and, and it's just so good to be out the back of it and it's good to be out the back of it with, with all of our, with all of our product lines running.

Uh, now, um, zero two W needs to catch up, but apart from that.

Jonathan: All right. Um, I want to ask. What's the, what's the weirdest or most surprising thing that you've seen somebody do with one of the Raspberry Pi products?

Eben: Oh, well, look, the whole thing is weird, right? Well Everyone using Raspberry Pis to do everything is a bit strange.

Um, look, um, I I'm going to need to get a new example, but I, I'm always drawn back to the cucumber sorter. Um, the, the, the, uh, gentleman in Japan whose parents were cucumber farmers. There was a, uh, they would spend a lot of their day getting older. They would spend a lot of their day sorting Japanese spiny cucumbers into 23 different boxes, depending on how straight they were, how green they were, how many spines they had.

Um, and he built a TensorFlow train, a machine learning model to, to, to do an initial classification, a little conveyor belt, little flippers that knocked him into into buckets. Um, and I look, I like it cause it's whimsical, but I also like it because it's, it's actually a scale model. You know, we have people deploying tens, hundreds, high tens of thousands of individual customers to bring high tens of thousands of Raspberry Pi's in industrial environments.

And actually that's a toy model of what all of those things are, right? They're things that sit at the intersection of interfacing, particularly input and particularly vision. Um, output, actuation, compute, and network. Um, and that's the kind of, that's the bit, that's the Lego. You talk about, you couldn't have focus grouped it into existence.

Nobody really had perceived that there was this hole. Browse by shape, hole. This missing bit of Lego, this missing bit of glue that could stick all those things together and let people do projects. Um, and so that's probably, it remains. I love it because it's whimsical and it's got Cucumber, but, um, I, I, I also, I like Cucumber.

Jonathan: Alright, last two questions I've got to ask. It's sort of a contractual obligation. What is your favorite programming language and text editor?

Eben: Oh, uh, favorite programming language and text editor, uh, favorite programming language Um, it's, um, it's gonna be either 6502 or 68000 assembly language, they're both lovely.

And they're just the programming languages of my childhood, you know. BBC Basics is pretty good too, actually. Um, but it's, they're the programming languages of my childhood. I'd probably go with 6502 because it's, because I'm very time poor at the moment. It's the one that's still gives me has that haiku like, um, feeling that you can write 64 bytes of it and have some fun.

So I can go with 652 of some language. Um, in terms of a text editor, um, do still like entering it, the command line, uh, in, in, in BBC emulated BBC that actually the line it's just not bad on the BBC. Um, probably, uh, for, for production use, probably Visual Studio Code, um, actually is, is, is a nice, uh, it's, it's a nice, it's a nice platform.

It's kind of available everywhere.

Jonathan: Yes, and open source too. It's one of the neatest things that Microsoft has done.

Eben: Yeah, forgive all the JavaScript. You

Jonathan: will, yes. Alright, thank you so much for being here, sir. We do appreciate it. And, uh, boy, I think that was a great hour, hour and a few minutes of chatting with you.

Thank you so much.

Eben: Thank you very much indeed.

Jonathan: All right. Elliot, what do you think?

Elliot: I think it's awesome.

Jonathan: Thank you. Yeah. Um, I think it's, uh, some, some interesting observations about the IPO that, that may or may not happen, that everybody is.

Elliot: Sorry to press on that, but, you know, everybody's thinking

Jonathan: it. Yeah, well, no, I mean, it's, I would say it's better to, to let, to let Eben and, you know, the Raspberry Pi as a group speak for themselves to those concerns.

Because, obviously, they've, they've thought about it. Surely they've thought about it. You can tell by the answers that they've thought about it. Um, and, you know, giving them a venue to, to answer some of those questions. I think it's probably a good thing. Um, it's always fun as well. When you get one of these sort of hero products that you use so much to be able to talk to them and say, Hey.

It'd be really nice if X, Y, and Z and so maybe, maybe, maybe we abused our position just a little bit , but we got 'em in . Yeah. No,

Elliot: I, I, yeah, I never, never hesitate to talk to fellow enthusiasts about your enthusiasm, right? Yeah. Like when you've got something like that and you're like, you know, I , you know, I want this thing to have screw mount points.

Never ever hesitate to talk to people because you never know. Who's going to be listening and who is on your team with

Jonathan: that, right? Yeah. Yeah, I suppose that's true. So I think about the things that I'm involved in as a developer. And if somebody comes into our Discord and says, It would be great if we could do this.

You know, sometimes it's a thing that's been asked for a thousand times. And there's a really good reason. About half the time it's like, We never thought about that. That would be really cool. So, uh, alright. Um, thank you, Elliot, for being here. I do appreciate it. Uh, let's see, so next week on the schedule, we are talking with, we're talking with Julian Lamb about NodeBB, which is It's it's forum software.

It's it's modern up to date forum software and that's gonna be really interesting to talk with him Let's see. Do you have anything you want to plug Elliot?

Elliot: No, read more Hackaday.

Jonathan: Read more Hackaday. There you go. I will I will agree with that So the the two things that I normally plug is one on Hackaday.

We've got the security column goes live every Friday morning Be sure to check that out, follow me there. Who writes that? Uh, that would be yours truly. I keep up with the security happenings of the week, the things I find interesting. Um, and then the other thing is the Untitled Linux Show, and that's still over at Twit, twit.

tv. And the audio version of that is now available to the public. But if you want to be on the Twit Discord, if you want to get the video version, that's still in Club Twit. So go check that out. Thank you to everyone. We had a good, good audience in the Hackaday discord. Thank you to those there. And we sure appreciate everybody on the download that listens to, and we'll see you next week on Floss Weekly.