If you count your engineers' spare time as billable hours donated to charity, and then sell the chips to that charity at cost, but write off the profit as charitable donations to reduce your overall tax burden, you sure do. Particularly for chips that weren't going to be sold anyway (the original SoC was from a Roku like device that had been EoLed and Broadcom had been left with a surplus of the chips they didn't know what to do with).

Which I'm not counting as a negative. This is successful example of charitable giving where everyone wins.

Just because Kramer didn't know the process behind writing things off, doesn't mean that there isn't a real process and it isn't being used in this case.

This is the whole reason why the rpi foundation is a charity, to allow these financial structures.

> Just because Kramer didn't know the process behind writing things off, doesn't mean that there isn't a real process and it isn't being used in this case.

I'm not saying it isn't a real process. I'm saying it isn't magic. Reducing your taxable income by $1,000 doesn't mean you save $1,000.

I never said it did.

But marking your engineers' spare time as donated since your contract owns everything they produce anyway, and selling chips at cost and marking the profit as a donation when you were probably going to take a loss on them does in fact net you ahead.

My gut says these SoCs are being sold below cost.

IDK, even rpi4 is still on 28nm which is the cheapest process per gate right now. And they really have very few gates allthibgs considered. I could absolutely see somewhere between $5 and $10 at cost, not counting R&D.