Raspberry Pi Sees Their First Price Increase Due To Supply Chain issues

[pkese]

RaspberryPI is a really bad HW platform regarding stability.

USB power supplies limited to 2A and too thin USB cables can cause voltage drops that lead into instabilities, lock-ups and even damaged SD cards.

Their own solution to that problem was to introduce a non-standard 5.1V USB power supply hoping to circumvent voltage drop across USB cable. Needless to say, it is an ugly hack that doesn't really solve the issue.

Then, once you fix voltage (with a thick cable and a soldering iron), you get the issue of their own Linux distribution writing huge amounts of data to SD card every day and eventually wearing out flash chip on the SD card.

They should provide a board with an on-board power supply (ideally with a battery connector for internal UPS) and an m.2 port for a proper SSD with proper wear levelling.

[rclark]

I've had good luck running the RPIs. stability hasn't been a problem unless hanging a external HDD off of them. In that case an external powered USB hub was necessary.

As for the SD card, I solved that by booting from a USB 3.0 SSD. Much faster and reliable. That said, I have two Zeros that are are active 24x7, one monitors a switch and other activates a relay that just 'runs and runs' (both using SD cards). No problems with them either over the years.

Also have another running the PDP 11/70 front panel, but also is my PI-Hole, website, ntp server, redis server and also runs 24x7. Boots off external SSD. Very reliable.

So for my usage, the RPI has been great.

[quaz0r]

wen rpi5

[rclark]

Forgot to say that I don't mind the RPI4 1G SBC at all. Wish they had kept it at a lower price point anyway instead of just dropping it back when. That said, I don't mind the price increase. Still cheap. For the things I've done and plan on doing, the 1G is way overkill. I run most all of my PIs headless. I suppose there are some applications that will actually make use of all that memory if you run the RPI as a desktop computer, but I haven't ran into one yet!

[tildearrow]

wen rpi5

rpi5 son

[smitty3268]

All kind of nodes are affected in the current scenario. Just look at the automotive industry. They are reducing production of popular models because they cannot find chips to put on those vehicles. I doubt very much things like traction control, electronic fuel injection or infotainment modules utilize advanced nodes.

They don't, and that's precisely the problem.

The factories with the old nodes are maxed out on production, but nobody is building new 28nm fabs.

All the new production coming online is 7nm (ish, depending on the company) and smaller, but the auto industry has kept their 28nm chips for a decade without updating because they didn't want to have to validate them again.

[M@GOid]

They don't, and that's precisely the problem.

The factories with the old nodes are maxed out on production, but nobody is building new 28nm fabs.

All the new production coming online is 7nm (ish, depending on the company) and smaller, but the auto industry has kept their 28nm chips for a decade without updating because they didn't want to have to validate them again.

I heard it slightly different: the car industry embraced "just-in-time" manufacturing decades ago. So when demand stops, there is no stockpiles of unused components. With covid, car sales dropped hard, so they pull the plug on components orders. But demand restarted too fast, and suppliers (in theory) couldn't ramp-up production fast enough. So it is car executives fault for keeping margins too thin. And now they are having a hard time explaining that in the investors meetings.

[smitty3268]

I heard it slightly different: the car industry embraced "just-in-time" manufacturing decades ago. So when demand stops, there is no stockpiles of unused components. With covid, car sales dropped hard, so they pull the plug on components orders. But demand restarted too fast, and suppliers (in theory) couldn't ramp-up production fast enough. So it is car executives fault for keeping margins too thin. And now they are having a hard time explaining that in the investors meetings.

It's both, actually.

The 28nm (or whatever old nodes they use) production is maxed out, but the car manufacturers (or rather their suppliers) did have a chunk of it reserved.

During the shutdown they cancelled all their orders, and their production got sold off to others instead.

Now they realize they need a bunch of supply real fast, but those plants have contracts with other companies and can't just cancel them to give the automakers priority. And they've been attempting to bring on additional resources as much as possible but nobody even makes that old equipment anymore so it's fairly limited what they can do once they're running at 100% capacity.

If they were on a newer node, it'd be easier for them to bring up new capacity by throwing money at it.

[coder]

you get the issue of their own Linux distribution writing huge amounts of data to SD card every day and eventually wearing out flash chip on the SD card.

If your root partition is on a sd card, then you should really get a high-endurance model, like those made for professional and industrial use cases.

They should provide a board with an on-board power supply (ideally with a battery connector for internal UPS) and an m.2 port for a proper SSD with proper wear levelling.

Get an ODROID device with eMMC storage. I have a N2+ and it's pretty awesome.

[coder]

wen rpi5

Don't get your hopes up for a massive improvement. Given their price constraints and prior plans, they're likely to stay on a 28 nm node, which means no massive improvements should be expected.

I think they're likely to improve the GPU more than the CPU cores, because the GPU is the most outdated aspect of the Pi v4.