Re:Milk-V Mars: RISC-V credit card size SBC
by synergy20 on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @03:58PM
(#36409632)
I will just use SOM modules from RPi for products, carrier board is relatively easy to design
Re:Milk-V Mars: RISC-V credit card size SBC
by geerlingguy on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @10:34PM
(#36413680)
Also, depending on your designs, certifications may already be taken care of for WiFi, BT, etc by integrating it on the module.
It depends on your definition of "normal". A lot of high-end chips are completely unavailable on the open market, with manufacturers often not even willing to publish a product brief - let alone a datasheet. Try finding a Displayport MST hub chip, for example!
Things are indeed very different for the RP2040. They are widely available in both small and large quantities, and have excellent documentation publicly available. Alas, they are not SoCs!
Last time I checked, Broadcom forced you to integrate their compute modules into your product because there was no way they would sell their CPUs alone, no matter how many of them one would be willing to buy. That is not normal in the industrial world. As an example, the Allwinner H3 used in a lot of boards is $5 each for 1000+ pieces at Alibaba, or $10 at Olimex in the EU in single quantity. It's also well documented. https://linux-sunxi.org/H3
Things may be different with the RP2040, which is a very interesting part, but that chip has nothing in common, except the name, with the ones running the bigger Linux capable Raspberries.