Re: Single-Core Cortex A9 1ghz, ECC DDR3 RAM available soon
On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 5:20 PM, Phil Endecott
<spam_from_debian_arm@chezphil.org> wrote:
> I would be interested to know where boards like the Beagle/Panda/etc. actually
> end up. I would guess that a few batches of 30 to a training provider or a
> build farm or for use in a small-volume product would quickly outweigh
> individual sales to people like us. Is it those sales that determine viability?
i think the most important thing that tells you a lot is that it's
the SoC vendors themselves that are doing these boards, rather than
OEMs/ODMs.
the fact that there exists a community around such boards means that
you then immediately have a community who help the SoC vendor offload
some of the software development.
one of the major burdens on the SoC vendors is the fact that the
majority of OEMs and ODMs require to be "spoon-fed" complete and total
solutions. they don't _have_ CAD/CAM software that's any good (or
people who can use it): they can just about cope with moving some of
the components a few millimetres, to try to reorganise the board (and
they fail even at that, quite often). they don't know what a compiler
is, and they certainly don't know what the GPL Software License is.
so _anything_ that increases the amount of software options out there
- and putting these little boards into the hands of random dummies
like us does exactly that - is bloody worth it for them.
l.
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