That's a given. Broadcom effectively abandoned Videocore. The only significant user of Videocore GPUs nowadays is the Raspberry Pi and this is a thorn in Broadcom's eye.
It's interesting then that the RPi4 has a VideoCore6 vs 4 with a ton more features. I'm not sure why Broadcom would put in the work if RPi was the only real consumer.
Because the VideoCore 6 is also already an ancient design. And last I checked Broadcom is still doing set top box stuff, which is where these chips are from:
The Pi chips are probably surplus. This is how many SBC vendors are able to sell their boards so cheaply. It's a good repurposing as well, lots of these chips were going to sit in warehouses until the end of time.
Yeah, every Raspberry Pi chip that came after the original was custom designed and created for the sole purpose of being used in Raspberry Pis. They just made some... interesting design decisions.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation was definitely optimizing for the IP their volunteers & employees were familiar with and had confidence in.
Other boards beat the Raspberry Pi in mainline kernel support, USB & Ethernet I/O & price years ago, but there is a significant ecosystem that the Foundation seeks to support, and the best way they know how to do so is with the tools they are intimately familiar with.
> Other boards beat the Raspberry Pi in mainline kernel support, USB & Ethernet I/O & price years ago
You sound knowledgeable, so I'll ask: if you don't care about the RPi ecosystem (or IoT use-cases at all, really), what's the optimum SBC across all those axes currently? Like, what board would you choose to base a cheap one-off HTPC+NAS on?
I like the OrangePi lineup, particularly the OrangePi PC Plus as it has 8GB eMMC and decent specs while being sub-$30 with a case and accessories: https://m.aliexpress.com/item/32668421022.html
For a NAS, nearly all of the OrangePis feature USB ports & ethernet that are directly wired to the SOC, so you aren't I/O limited like older Raspberry Pi's. That being said, the Allwinner H3 doesn't support 10 bit Hevc/H.265 acceleration, so you might want to go with a board based on a newer chip for a HTPC. Take a peek at LibreELEC, they have a decent HTPC distro for many SBCs.
