There's almost an "infinite" supply of RP2040 chips:
In a recent episode of Tom's Hardware: The Pi Cast, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton revealed that 10 million RP2040 chips have been made since 2021 and that there could be more Raspberry Pi stores opening in the future.
Tom's Hardware Editor-in-Chief and The Pi Cast co-host Avram Piltch asked Upton "Why are there no shortage of RP2040 based products?" and Upton's answer "We took some big risks" lead to the revelation that Raspberry Pi purchased 500 wafers in 2021.
From a wafer, the yield is approximately 2000 die for 30mm. Newer chips, such as those in the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and Raspberry Pi 4 use a 45mm square die, respectively the BCM2710 and BCM2711 packages. From a wafer Raspberry Pi expect to make 1400 die.
Upton then does the math and from 500 wafers, each yielding around 21,000 die, there are around 10 million RP2040 chips.
[...] This "stockpile" of chips from 2021 are what many of us keen Pico users are currently consuming, be it in the form of Raspberry Pi Pico , Pico W or third-party boards. Upton then talks about what is "effectively an infinite supply [of RP2040]" based upon how many die can be created per wafer. This is a refreshing statement, given how global supply chains have been hit by the pandemic.
Related: Raspberry Pi Adds 100,000 Units to Supply Chain, Back to Pre-Pandemic Levels in 2023
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Raspberry Pi Adds 100,000 Units to Supply Chain, Back to Pre-pandemic Levels in 2023:
For Raspberry Pi enthusiasts it must seem that Christmas has come a few weeks early this year. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced via the official blog that a 100,000 units had been secured for single-unit sales (one unit per customer) and that by the second half of 2023 it is expected that will return to pre-pandemic levels. This is good news for those who have felt the bite of the supply shortage that has dogged the Raspberry Pi for well over a year. The bad news? Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W see a $5 price increase, but the Raspberry Pi Zero will be available for bulk purchase in 2023.
[...] In the blog post, Upton acknowledged the patience of the community and offers the 100,000 units, made up of Raspberry Pi Zero W, 3A+ and Raspberry Pi 4 2GB and 4GB for single-unit sale. We don't know the breakdown of how many of each model there will be, but Upton does indicate that it is likely that Raspberry Pi Zero W will come back into stock first. Following that, the Raspberry Pi 3A+ and then versions of the Raspberry Pi 4. Upton confirms that units are "flowing into the Approved Reseller channel now, and this is already translating into better availability figures on rpilocator."
[...] Commercial and industrial sales will be actively managed, with commercial / industrial customers set to "receive the units they need". Changes have also been made to ensure that "inventory-building behaviour which would otherwise prolong the shortage for everybody else can't take place."
Technologist David Bombal has a one-hour interview with Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton. The interview covers a range of topics, starting with the big questions about unit availability and when more stock will be available.
00:00 - Intro: Tough Environment
00:07 - Intro: Eben Upton hacked the network as a kid
00:40 - Raspberry Pi shortage (stock availability)
07:22 - People say that you're not looking after hobbyists!
10:12 - Raspberry Pi OS is backwards compatible
12:37 - The pain affecting all of us
16:33 - The origin of the Raspberry Pi // How it started
23:16 - Eben hacked the school network // Creating an environment for young hackers
32:05 - Changing the Cambridge and the World
35:00 - African growth and plans
40:03 - General purpose Computer vs iPhone vs Chromebook
43:28 - Possible IPO and Raspberry Pi Foundation
44:50 - The Raspberry Pi RP2040
48:33 - How is Raspberry Pi funded?
49:10 - How is the next product decided?
50:22 - Raspberry Pi Foundation sticking to its roots
51:17 - Advice for the youth or anyone new
56:01 - Changing roles // From tech to business
57:08 - Do you need to go to university? // Do you need degrees?
01:00:05 - Learning from experiences
01:01:44 - Creating opportunities
01:05:05 - Conclusion
No transcript is available and Eben does speak very quickly. Also published on YouTube if you do not have the obligatory LBRY account to block the algorithmic "recommendations".
Vlogger Jeff Geerling has an analysis of rumors of a future IPO for Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd.
But long-term, will Eben's vision for what makes Raspberry Pi change? Will there be turnover and some of the people who make the Pi a joy to use be gone?
Will the software side start leaning on subscriptions to increase revenues to make shareholders happy?
And ultimately, could Eben be replaced, and would that change things? Yes, probably, but I won't speculating about any that here. See my blog post about enshittification from last month if you wanna read more about that topic.
What I will do is answer some misconceptions I've seen about Raspberry Pi and the IPO.
The Register covered the IPO discussion the other day and while bankers have been appointed to the task, the CEO asserts that nothing will change.
"The business is in a much better place than it was last time we looked at it. We partly stopped because the markets got bad. And we partly stopped because our business became unpredictable."
"Unpredictable" is an understatement for many who attempted to acquire certain models of the computer during the supply chain crunches of recent years. "The public markets value predictability as much as they value performance," said Upton.
Previously:
(2023) Arm Acquires Minority Stake in Raspberry Pi
(2023) Eben Upton Interview on Raspberry Pi Availability Update and Painful Decisions
(2023) Raspberry Pi Produced 10 Million RP2040s in 2021, More Pi Stores Likely
(2022) 10 Years of Raspberry Pi: the $25 Computer Has Come a Long Way
(2021) Raspberry Pi Raises Price for First Time, Reintroduces 1 GB Model for $35
... and many more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2023, @02:14PM (3 children)
Are they useful in missiles or something sexy like that? I'm not sure what the hoopla is about.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday January 13 2023, @02:54PM
If you are bodging together your own missile perhaps. Don't know if the Russians can put them to good use as replacement for their devices. But they are quite useful in building little devices for old computers, which is mainly what I use my pies for.
Also ... Infinite Pie .... Mmmmmmm .... Pie ....
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday January 13 2023, @10:49PM
Well, they are pretty sexy with their programmable I/O pipelines that you can kinda see as some sort of all-purpose interface for whatever, offering you a HDMI, a USB, a serial or whatever else you need there without burdening the (also quite beefy for such a cheap little toy) CPU.
(Score: 1) by GloomMower on Saturday January 14 2023, @05:10AM
It is sort of like an arduino except faster, smaller, and cheaper.
What happens when things are faster smaller and cheaper. You find more uses for them.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rich on Friday January 13 2023, @02:17PM
When aggregating the article, the word "square" and the size of the 2040 die were lost. From TFA: The RP2040 has 2mm^2 per die, which makes a bit over 20k dies fit on a wafer. The older BCM SoCs had 30mm^2, for about 2k dies per wafer, and the latest generation's die has 45mm^2, and yields 1400 dies/wafer.
The point Upton wanted to make for us to take home: They secured ample supply, even for the peripheral components of the Pico. And unsaid: We're supposed to base our designs on the Pico board, because we're supposed to be certain that there won't be supply chain issues.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Friday January 13 2023, @02:20PM (4 children)
Yeah you did, and you failed...
Let me give you a different take: you made the things that people aren't (that) interested in(*) resulting in oversupply and your precious "no shortage". In reality, people want to buy the RPi3/4's at a faster rate than you build them, evidenced by the shortage we've experienced for what, 18 months now? The reason you haven't run out of the RP2040 is because you made more than what the demand was (well done, have a cookie).
Similarly, you made fewer of the parts that people do want to buy (RPi3/4s).
Until I can buy those again at reasonable prices, don't come at me with "we took some big risks".
So yeah, you took some "big risks" and the result of it is that people are unhappy and complain about you because they can only by the components they are interested in at scalper prices.
This isn't risk taking, this is ignorance of your market!
Also, reporting on 2021 numbers in 2023 is kinda... lame.
(*) Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of what they build and I love Pi's. But the level of spin in their answer makes me dizzy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday January 13 2023, @03:54PM
That might be part of it, but the main reason from what I have been reading the last few years is that it is because nearly all of the Pico is made domestically. In contrast the normal credit card sized Raspberry Pi which still had many components made overseas where it got caught up in the supply chain fiasco that everyone else has gotten caught in too. Production is ramping up for the general purpose Raspberry Pis again [raspberrypi.com]. A possible Raspberry Pi 5 won't be around until at least 2024 [tomshardware.com] so that production can focus on the backlog demand for the 4B, 3B, 3A, etc.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Friday January 13 2023, @04:07PM (2 children)
Kind of.
What's going on is the usual hoarding that happens with TP etc. I kinda know a guy who bought years of some shitty arduino chip from 2014, wiped out his entire countries supply, because everything works on zero inventory except paying his bills so he NEEDS to hoard years worth of chips if the crunch will last years and he meanwhile wants to eat.
If nobody does that there will be no shortage. If anyone does that, no one eats. So HOARD HOARD HOARD!
What saved the RP2040 is its too new for anyone to need it to eat, its not in any commercial products, not even shitty tindie/etsy products, at least not as of back then.
The economics are kind of impressive IF the supply is low enough that hoarders can pump n dump the market. If I had $100M laying around, I could "invest" in RP2040s and blow the price up to at least double, then sell for $200M+. This is what's killing the legacy pi's right now, you get a shipment in at adafruit or digikey or wtf.com and "everyone knows" you can buy those for list price $35 or whatever and sell them on ebay/amazon for $150, so if you have nothing better to do than grab nickels from in front of steamrollers you can make some money off the shortage. Just to be perfectly clear, the ONLY way to end the pi shortage is for the pi foundation to sell infinite pi directly at $150 until people stop paying $150 then smoothly crash the price until the speculators and scammers give up. That or dump 10M units on the market at once like they did with the RP2040 and the scammers don't have the capital to pump and dump that many all at once, so the marketplace remains sane... for now...
Honestly the best thing the pi people could do is dump the legacy pi, its a dead platform now. Nobody has had access to them for years except for scammers so all the innovation is in ESP land or at least not in legacy pi land. Instead of blinking a LED using GPIO calls from a bash shell in linux on a legacy pi, blink LEDs using CircuitPython on a ESP32. Because 1) you can buy pi anyway 2) ESP32 is like $5 vs pi was $40 even when you could buy one, which you probably never will again. 3) frankly its easier to use the ESP32 LOL.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Friday January 13 2023, @10:56PM (1 child)
As long as 150 bucks are being paid for Pis that cost about 35 retail, scalpers could even get away with throwing away 2/3 of the supplies they hoover up to keep their prices stable. I'm fairly sure, as supplies normalize, you'll see them push the price even upwards to make up for lower margins as they have to trash more and more of the Pis they have to buy to keep the shortage going.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday January 14 2023, @12:05AM
I mod you up but I just want to second that.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday January 13 2023, @11:34PM
If one knows where to by Pi4 below $100 please let me know.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.