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Broadcom is one of the reasons why the rpi foundation is able to ship so many devices. But I also believe they should, perhaps, find another partner, who's willing to go full in the open source thing.

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Broadcom must have earned heaps from Raspberry Pi in all in all.

Was it a buddy deal to start with, isn't the rpi founder ex-Broadcom?

Yes and yes, they make no secret of it.

The original prototypes for an RPi like thing by Upton were ATMega based [1] but I imagine with Upton's connections to Broadcom it made some sense both technically and financially.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20111024203123/http://www.raspbe...

Thing is nearly all the ARM-chip manufactures are similar or the same. One of the weird things about the Apple M chips (well at least on Laptops) is you can make the more open source than most ARM chips.

This is one of the reasons why I sort of dread the upcoming move to arm on desktops and laptops, despite the potential massive performance improvements. At least it seems like the industry will need to head that way if they want performance per watt on par with the Apple M chips.

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