Charles Stephenson  wrote:
> Just curious too, what was the 'original plan' behind the reasoning for
> making this system? Surprised it wasn't thought of years ago. How long have
> they been in around?

The original design of the VideoCore processor is from a company called
Alphamosaic - targeting STB and mobile devices (gaming, media players,
phones).  Alphamosaic was a spinout from Cambridge Consultants, who worked
on a videophone project for Orange.
https://sites.google.com/site/robertswann15/case-histories/alphamosaic

Alphamosaic was bought by Broadcom, and VideoCore was used in various phones
and STBs.  At this stage VC was just a GPU.

Eben and others had been pondering making an educational computer
since ~2006.  The early prototypes were Atmega-based (roughly like an
Arduino).

A few years later, Eben got a job at Broadcom.

Broadcom management then decided they needed a corporate-social
responsibility project.  The engineers said 'well actually, we have
something'

An ARM11 core was added to a corner of the VideoCore chip because it's what
they had available and suitably licensed.  The chip took about a month to
design and verify (a very quick turnaround).  The ARM is 'just another
peripheral' to the VideoCore.


So basically the architecture is an accident of history, and why the
VideoCore is in charge.
(That's my understanding of the chronology anyway.  I may have the last two
points in the wrong order).

Small, cheap Linux machines were around before Raspberry Pi - in the form of
wireless routers running (for instance) OpenWRT.  However they weren't as
friendly, lack of video output made them less easy to use, and models kept
changing.  The main success of the Pi project has been to unlock vast
amounts of free developer time to make the platform a lot more polished than
anything previous.

Theo

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