That’s another good pick yeah. N350 stuff will also be interesting.
2020 has shown that the Pi Foundation sees itself as an industry-first product.
I think they never saw themselves as anything other than an industry-first product. The “hobbyist” market was just a way to develop, test and enter the mass market and gain critical mass in terms of FAB capacity and support / mind-share. IMHO their goal was always to go into the industry and disrupt some markets* but you can’t just get there without the scale. They just played an entire generation of hobbyist making them addicted to their product to grow it and test it for them.
Now that they’re public and partially owned by Broadcom it will just get worse.
The Pi Foundation kind of held the SBC market hostage to their ecosystem because software support is important and all the shinny Python libraries people are used to are typically only fully compatible, stable and tested with the Pi GPIO. With the RP2040 chip they make it so software/library compatibility is no longer a barrier to other CPU makers to enter the market - Intel or even Rockchip and Mediatek SBCs can include the RP2040 and gain instant software compatibility with any software library made for the Pi GPIO. Note that right now when RK releases an SBC it take a while for libraries to catch up with the GPIO definitions and whatnot.
I’m sure they aware of this risk, however, there’s a much bigger market opportunity there - the SPI / i2C / GPIO bridge market typically held by FTDI. When you want to make low level hardware communicate with computers, usually on USB ports, you’ll need some kind of hardware to handle the low level SPI / i2C / GPIO signals and convert them into something the CPU and the OS can understand, this is where FTDI has a big market share, even the Arduino uses a chip made by them for that.
The RP2040 can do this exact same task - it is what it does on the RPI 5 after all - and that’s a very big market. Almost every peripheral we connect to our computers is using one of those bridges to connect low level hardware such as microcontrollers to the computer or to simply toggle LEDs. Broadcom is now an investor of the Pi Foundation and they do a lot of hardware that does require those kinds of bridges… maybe they were the ones pushing the Pi guys into this direction because business wise it makes sense - they can test the reliability of those chips on the SBC market and once they’re sure they perform as good as FTDI ones they can use them everywhere for a fraction of the cost.
Let’s see who gains more from the RP2040, the Pi guys obliterating FTDI or Intel and others taking chunks of the SBC market.
There’s already a couple of examples of what I’m saying here: