[GLLUG] Fw: Re: Raspberry Pi has a competitor?

[Bryan Laur]

There a few things about the price point you folks may have missed.

"Thanks to the low cost of the Allwinner Cortex A8, mass-volume pricing ****(just for the CPU card, and therefore excluding tax, shipping, profit, a case and a power supply)**** looks to be on target for around $15: 40% lower than the raspberrypi which is only a 700mhz ARM11 and is therefore at least three times slower in processor speed than the Allwinner A10."

1) Notice that the $25 price point for the RPI -includes- profit (or "donation"). (charities still need to make profit to fund future table events/ventures). 

The $15 price point from rhombus-tech includes no profit. They aren't comparable figures.


----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/orders/
The mass-volume (100k units) price will be somewhere around $15: the more committments received, the closer the price will get to that. One expression of interest has been received for 1,000 (stable) units: a pricing evaluation request is outstanding with the factory and will be reported as soon as it is received.


2) As a charity, RPI has enough equity to do batch sizes of 10,000 units or so (I can't remember the exact figure, and the site is down for SOPA as previously mentioned).

In order to get $15 price, rhombus-tech will need to do 100,000 units.
(A) This is obviously not going to be the introduction cost.
(B) This is till not including any profit. The risk of spending $1.5mil likely requires profit.

3) They aren't a charity. 

Conclusion: This device will never sell at $15. It probably will never sell at $25.


Lastly, they aren't nearly as far along as RPI is.


Answers to other questions-
"So it's just a convenient peripheral connector or will you have to
plug it into something else to make full use of it? That's what I'm
unclear on."

Yes, it's just a casing that is currently already mass-produced. It has nothing to do with PCMCIA. You might need a PCMCIA header to interface with it, but thats it.


"I _thought_ the raspberry pi would be open hardware (schematics, parts
list, board layout), but I can't verify since their site is blacked
out for SOPA day and google isn't helping right now. "
AFAIK, the openness of their hardware is rather uncertain. We will never get a datasheet from Broadcom for the chip.
Though, I think Gurt was working on a "high-level" datasheet. Whether they plan on releasing Gerbers or schematics is yet to be seen.

If they do, they won't be significantly useful because hobbyists will likely never get their hands on the chip.



----- Original Message -----
From: Charles Ulrich <charles at bityard.net>
To: Rocky Lichen <rockylichen at yahoo.com>
Cc: linux-user at egr.msu.edu
Sent: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:11:48 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: [GLLUG] Fw: Re: Raspberry Pi has a competitor?

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Rocky Lichen <rockylichen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> According to http://rhombus-tech.net/faq/#index11h2
> "Satellite TV 'Conditional Access Modules' are in PCMCIA form-factor, meaning that the connectors, housings and assemblies are all still mass-produced" and "the pricing on parts is still good in mass-volume quantities."

So it's just a convenient peripheral connector or will you have to
plug it into something else to make full use of it? That's what I'm
unclear on.

> Note that the Rhombus-Tech Allwinner is just about the same size as the Raspberry Pi.
>
> According to http://opensource.com/life/12/1/linux-hardware-race-tiniest-and-cheapest-15-cheap
> the Allwinner is GPL-compliant open hardware, while Raspberry Pi has yet to make a decision on HW openness.

GPL compliant, yes, but the physical design won't be open hardware.
The FAQ states that they're contracting with a firm in China to
develop the board, so it won't be open hardware in the Arduino sense.

I _thought_ the raspberry pi would be open hardware (schematics, parts
list, board layout), but I can't verify since their site is blacked
out for SOPA day and google isn't helping right now. The RaspPI will
have at least one binary firmware blob, I believe for the GPU.

> As for how they can do it cheaper, prices are falling so rapidly in the smartphone-ish device space that if you start later and develop faster . . .

I've seen too many hardware projects that promised a very attractive
price for the end unit, but then after the prototypes are built, the
cold reality of mass manufacture, transportation, taxes, distribution,
and other costs sets in.

> The second link above also discusses the CuBox, which is already shipping.  It costs a whopping $129, but includes case, p/s, ethernet, eSATA, Ubuntu on microSD, etc., in a 2" cube.

That's ridiculously tiny! But personally, I'm more interested in cheap
and power-efficient than small.

Charles
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