YouSaid · the spoken record

Eben Upton

lines on the record: 92
first: 2022-03-08
most recent: 2022-03-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“To post a child for a particular thing about creativity and a particular thing about unlocking the power of general purpose compute, right? We're a general purpose compute company. We've made general purpose computers. We believe in general purpose computers. We hate appliance computing. Appliance computing will never let you do that because it's not what it's for. Appliance computers let you do the thing or a small variant on the thing that the appliance creator wanted or had thought of. General purpose computers let you do whatever the hell you want. And that's why we love them. And that's why we're going to keep making them.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't want to say that cucumber soda, but it is still the cucumber sorter. Japanese engineer, elderly parents running a cucumber farm, Japanese cucumbers need to be sorted into 23 bins, and it's challenging as you get older to keep doing that. And so this chap trained a TensorFlow machine vision model to discriminate between different levels of spininess and colorfulness and rigidness and length and so forth of Japanese cucumbers and to perform a preliminary sort to assist his parents as they got older. It's a flippant example, but it is slightly wild and”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These people are so important to us and letting anyone down is painful and you can't, I don't know what it's like in the US, but you can't buy cement in the UK. Cement is on allocation, fence posts, fence panels are on allocation. And you can see people I know who work in the construction trade and how much it hurts them that there are things that they want to be building for their clients that they can't build. And it's as much about the... emotional thing as the financial thing because we're still selling a lot of computers and we're still making a lot of money and our customers are still buying a lot of computers and using them to make a lot of money but it's that emotional feeling is not a good feeling and I hope we'll be out of it soon but time will tell right”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not letting many people down as long as they're realistic about it. So that hurts. The other thing that hurts is the enthusiast community is really the heart and the energy of Raspberry Pi and the fact that the shortage is affecting people's ability to buy their first Raspberry Pi or their fifth or their tenth personal Raspberry Pi. That's very painful to us, mitigated a little bit, as I said, by the fact that most of our greatest enthusiasts have very large personal reserves of Raspberry Pis that they can dip into, they can go to the vault and get a Raspberry Pi 2 or a Raspberry Pi 3 or just last year's Raspberry Pi 4. That does mitigate it a little bit, but it's just...”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The service level that they have come to expect even if it was an amazing service level, it's the service level that we want to be able to offer. And so we have a small sales force. We're not really a selling organization. We're more letting people buy organization. But we do have a small sales force. And they spend almost their entire time now managing our industrial customers through this shortage and really looking someone in the eye and saying, when you say you want 500 Raspberry Pis, do you really want 500 Raspberry Pis? Are you building buffers? How many do you need tomorrow so your factory doesn't stop? Oh, 10. Okay, I'll send you 10 tomorrow and I'll send you ten the next day. So, you know, that kind of vary, and it's incredibly labor intensive, but it's the way we're getting our industrial customers through this challenge. And honestly, when people come to us.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unit, let's say 7 million units a year business, two million units of customer backlog, that's three to four months of demand. So there are on average, and it's poorly, it's unevenly distributed, but on average, there's a three to four month lead time for volume availability of Raspberry Pis. That's actually just a traditional company's model. That's just how most other people's hardware is. So what we've done is we've been beaten back to traditional business. We've had this weird, amazing business model. We've been beaten back to a traditional business model. It's no worse than it. Well, those people who were in that business model have been beaten back to one yearly time. So yeah, it is awful when somebody has built their product on our product and made a commitment to us. And we are not able to meet.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very bad. We sold the same number of Raspberry Pis last year that we sold the year before, but we entered last year with about a half million unit customer backlog, and we left last year with several million units of customer backlog. Now there's some panic dynamics in that number, so you can't just take the customer backlog and say, I would have, in a unconstrained market, I would have sold 7 plus X. You have to apply some discount factor to X to account for the fact that people are multi-ordering from several places, or they're trying to build buffers, but you use certainly millions of units of foregone volume last year. So that's unfortunate. The interesting thing is a big part of Raspberry Pi's value proposition is actually X stock available. So the ability to buy a Raspberry Pi or huge numbers for Raspberry Pi is $10,000, $50,000 Raspberry Pis from stock tomorrow. That's what Raspberry Pis like normally. What's really happened if you think $7 million...”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's see, buy good SD cards. This is a huge SD cards. It's a thing about power supplies. Official power supply has a captive cable. Why does it have a captive cable? Because USB cables are terrible. Go to the number of bell wire USB cables with 10 ohm USB cables that we met early in our even 1 ohm USB cables are pretty bad. So we have a captive cable on our official power supply because cables are terrible. The problem with SD cards is storage is not that the best SD cards are bad. It's the bad SD cards exist. So go sticker, go buy a Sandisk, go buy a real non-fake Sandisk SD card, stick it in your Raspberry Pi. It's amazing. It'll never go wrong. The weakness is the provision of choice. What do we do in the industrial space our compute module products have EMMC sold it down on them? I would love a Raspberry. Actually, Raspberry Pi would have sold it down here.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a horrible sort of financialist description of how the technology industry works. But every niche over time will come to be no more or no less profitable than it deserves to be. And I think Raspberry Pi's niche is actually quite a nice one and it's one that we are good at filling.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're a software, these guys are software companies with a recurring revenue. The tiny fraction of the app store value or the cell phone network operator value that is generated by all of this work. So I'm used to being in the semiconductor industry, which does huge amazing feats of intellectual endeavor and appropriates almost no value for it. So perhaps it seems very natural to me. But people do invest in semiconductor companies, right? And it is felt to be a thing that people do even though you can draw a picture that says you should really be a cell phone company or a network operator or you should be Epic Games. Or you should be some other participant. Somebody has to be that participant in the ecosystem. And the rules of capitalism mean that sooner or later you will end up being able to appropriate almost exactly your cost of capital no less and no more. as part of someone's differentiators your bit will”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10 hours. It's a lot of time to work on a bottom. You can get all work done on a bottom plane in 10 hours. I was just aware of this circle of silence expanding away from me and worrying that the circle of silence would intersect one of the gentlemen with the MP5 submachine guns. And yeah, so anyway, bill of materials. You think of the small fraction of the hardware bomb that any vendor, a PMIC vendor, a Wi-Fi chip vendor, anyone who's a RAM vendor, these people are doing huge amounts of work. I mean, doing fundamental pushing forward the bounds, the boundaries of human endeavor, the boundaries of human knowledge, huge amounts of work, vast sums, and then you make a few bucks. And then that's a tiny fraction of the hundreds of dollar value of that achieved when that product is sold to a customer, which itself is a tiny fraction of the services value.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had so much fun. I had so much fun at the, I remember when I was 2011 when we were designing Raspberry Pi and I sat at Heathrow Airport in the departure of Pete Lomas, my friend who designed my friend and co-founder who designed the hardware and I was on my way to California and I said to him something like can you send me the bomb? Because I may be on a plane for it.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would hope that one's investors had become one's investors because they like what you do rather than out of a conviction that you should go do something else, subsequent to being a games person. I come from a semiconductor industry background. A semiconductor is the toughest world. It's the most demoralizing world, right? I mean, you think about the intelligence that goes into making the Wi-Fi chip that goes into a smartphone. And you think how little money out of the whole stack of the hardware bomb for that platform is appropriated by the Wi-Fi chipset vendor.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I say a couple of things. I'm not sure the public market actually really does price that in the public market, imposes a fairly swinging discount on inorganic growth. You don't get the value. You cannot bolt a business together out of inorganic growth and expect the same multiples that you would get for organic growth. I think that's certainly in the UK that's a pretty established fact you get penalized for not having been smart enough to figure out how to go do it yourself. I appreciate it. There are some challenges associated with that which might not apply to a division-like nest inside a large company going and purchasing some inorganic growth. I don't know. I mean, I suspect that if we're one public”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bracketing all that, which I imagine is very challenging and certainly unprecedented. Let's say you do IPO. Now you got a lot of investors. Tend to want growth and they might come to you and say things like they're taking your $4 board and they're shipping a hundred dollar product and it's a making $70 worth of margin on that. Just go, we just gave you all this money. Go buy them. I can see that very clearly. When Google bought Nest, they basically said go on a shopping spree and this might have tanked Nest, I think if you asked Tony Fidel, he will tell you this is a thing that tanked Nest is Google made them go buy stuff they didn't really want to buy. I think the DropCam CO would happily tell you he did not want to be, right? But that's like what happens. You get a bunch of money and the simplest way to grow is to just like buy your nearest thing and buy the next high margin thing. How would you protect against that given everything you said?”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So would we at some point, yes, we might? Some of the things we do are very expensive and require large amounts of capital to make them happen. And obviously the public markets are a place that you could go to raise that money. There are other places you could go to raise the money as well. And obviously we have done recently. So I would probably never, I think probably the public discussion of the possibility that we might float the company has run ahead both of our appetite for it and of the kind of market level feasibility of floating anything at the moment. I mean, my view is certainly, I don't know what it's like in the US, my view is in London, markets are basically closed, right? So it's hard times.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a war on, right? I mean, sadly, I mean, it's terrible, right? I mean, we are in an unprecedented time now. And the very smallest and least important consequence of the unprecedented time that I think the graph of the, having an exponential graph of the number of uses of the word unprecedented in the last two years, the very least and least sad consequence of the unprecedentedness is that it's hard to float companies right now.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do. But we have one big investor, obviously. We have the foundation and we have the usual fiduciary responsibility of an organization to its big shareholder. We did a $45 million raise last September from a couple of investors. And so we have traditional fund manager money in the organization now. We're lucky. We found some great partners who believe in what we do and believe that what we do.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it does just it's purely mercenary, right? I mean, I just, it's the business model that we're good at and it's the business model that we think we are. There's a reason why there isn't one big, well, I mean, there's Amazon, right? But there's a reason why there isn't the one big company that does everything. And, you know, we are good at what we do and we would be bad at what many of our customers do with our platform.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those verticals together into one big horizontal blob. And then the residual bits of vertical specific expenditure innovation implementation get done by other people and the profits, the incremental profits associated with that verticalization, revertitalization of the horizontal Raspberry Pi platform flow to the people who take the risks and that's great for them. It's great for them and I want no part of it. I'll take my couple of bucks a unit. Thank you very much.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like Shakespeare 2. I thought that was a nice name. It was heritage. We optimized that. We optimize Chromium because those are applications which are so ubiquitous as to almost be middleware. No, we're very happy to make a few bucks. We only need to make a few bucks. We sell a lot of units. We only need to make a few bucks on each unit. If someone takes a Raspberry Pi and puts in a box and makes a hundred bucks on it, that's great. Well done. That person, because that person took risk. That person put all of their eggs in one vertical. If it doesn't pay off for them, they make no bucks. And if it pays off for them, then they make $100 a unit. And that's fair reward for the risk. We're kind of a horizontalizing platform. The interesting thing with Raspberry Pi is that we build this thing that has, there were lots of little verticals and whether those were consumer verticals or industrial verticals or verticals that didn't exist because they were too small to justify the investment in developing a hardware platform to address them. What Raspberry Pi does is it sort of smooshes all”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we love those people. One of the reasons why have we been successful? Why have we been able to defend our niche? Are we been able to defend our niche in large part? Because we don't pick winners. In my language, that would be picking a winner. That would be picking something that we think is worth pursuing and applications worth pursuing ourselves. We don't tend to pick winners in software either, so we don't tend to optimize specific applications. We tend to try to do as much middleware level optimization on the platform as possible because then those hours, those engineering hours benefit as many applications as possible. We do optimize XBMC, Cody, living in the past. We do optimize the Coding, me, Codi Media Player.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so that's my question for you, right? I see that as well, they just shipped me a Raspberry Pi. Like you open the box to Raspberry Pi. Maybe I could have made this on my own. Do you think about... Expansion into those areas? Do you think man like the market for Raspberry Pi based Plex servers is very high, we should start making some of those on our own at potentially higher margins because here's a company that's just buying our kit, putting it in a 3D printed box with some pre-labeled software and selling it as consumer products.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, they'll sort of tell you, we can't call it tell your mom sometimes. Tell your mom that such and such. Well, tell your dad that such and such being the sad kid in the middle between mom and dad is sometimes money to be made.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's amazing how often you see this with like, you know, Tesla and the number of Tesla, Tesla hacks because Tesla don't want to talk to anyone else.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And homebridge out of box, and it literally just is a Raspberry Pi that connects my ring cameras to home kit on my iPhone. Because Apple and Amazon would prefer not to talk to each other. Some guy just it's a whole company that does this.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For you, that means the chips have gotten more capable, right? I see a lot of people doing media servers or like Chromecast replacements with Raspberry Pis, more traditional consumer products. I have a Raspberry Pi here. It's my favorite product in my entire house. It's a product called Hoobs. It's a home kit out of box.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to take one more break, but we'll be right back. One of the things that I think is interesting is that the chips we've been talking about are cell phone chips and the cell phone supply chain exists now. They make a lot of chips. They make a lot of parts. You see those parts get recontextualized and all kinds. I would say LCD screens. You see them all over the place. Like, why are they cheap? Because cell phones exist. What is an, I guess, now a MetaQuest 2? It is a mid-range Android phone on your face. Just recontextualize all these parts.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if you've had five years, you can have a tenth of the memory on the device of additional bloat. Over time, that really does add up and make the system hard to use. But we had more bloat than that. And so there was that kind of user interface responsiveness and memory bloat figure where some of the last optimization items. And that means that you can have a 2014 era, 2012 era Raspberry Pi, you get it out of a drawer and you're not having to go back and download old offering system releases from us. You can download the new one. And so that's helped people, I think, a little bit. It's an additional cost for us because it's more testing. It's more me being a pain in the neck to the software team. But it does help people stretch.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“on my desk to make sure it was good and it wasn't actually good at the point where I first started doing that and one of the things the annoyances for the software team in the last month of the releasing process was me saying hang on a second here's the 2015 software release if I grab a window with my mouse and I waggle it it's smooth here's our new one if I grab a window and I waggle it it's jerky what's that what's that about fix that here's here's the memory footprint here's what happens when I run top here's the amount of memory that's reported free in 2015 here's the amount of memory that's reported free this year absolutely happy that the new operating system consumes a little more memory but I will give you an allocation of 10 megabytes 112 megabyte the old Raspberry Pi so I'll give you an allocation of 2% of the memory of the device per year for bloat”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unable to build units, probably enthusiasts have ended up finding it harder to buy raspberry pis. Everyone's found it harder to buy Raspberry Pis, but industrial users, we've largely been able to, maybe they're not getting everything they want, but they're getting something enthusiasts right now. You can buy Raspberry Pi, but you have to shop around to find somewhere that's in stock. What's happened is because lots of people have many Raspberry Pis, people have been thrown back.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're going to want to buy another Raspberry Pi. There you go. That's a recurring revenue stream. It's the first one. Your first one will probably not be your last. And certainly with devices like, I mean, devices like Pico and $4, they have this interesting model where people embed them. If something's expensive, then you'll do a project with them and then you will scavenge the object out of the project at the end with $4 products, $5 products, even the $35 products. People tend to leave them embedded in projects and buy another one. And that turns out to be fairly compelling. It's one of the reasons why while we have had challenges with the supply chain situation and those challenges have probably fallen and it's sad, they've probably fallen harder on our enthusiast base than they have on our industrial base for a variety of reasons in the sense that enthusiasts have received, you know, if we have been”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Red, it was like the pinnacle of the pod moment was tortilla pods. But all of that came down to you need a recurring revenue stream and you are a big successful company. I think Raspberry Pi is a cultural object now and the recurring revenue stream is you're going to want to buy another Raspberry.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But even the hardware companies, right? My favorite headline at The Verge to this day in 10 years. We just printed the words tortilla pods in all capital letters because I don't know if you remember this. There was a period where every new gadget was like it'll make drinks. It'll be a Kurig for X. And finally at the end, someone was like, we made a tortilla maker and there's a... $15 a month subscription to Tortilla pods. Put the pod. And it was like, this is so dumb. But it was like”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it's hard to get excited about it, really. It's like once you get to a point where there's something and by the time you're making your own chips, right, you've bought fairly firmly into the notion that you are a hardware company and that that's where your field of expertise is. But even a hardware company.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very early on, we tried some sort of App Store platform and it wasn't a success, it was a white labeled version of somebody else's platform. It wasn't a success and it wasn't a success because certainly at that time people weren't seeing it as a consumer device, it was good because we weren't seeing it as a consumption device and we did it in the service of this idea of fun that if we want this thing to be fun and attractive to kids it needs to have entertainment content on it and you need a store to make that work. We went through all the mechanics of doing that and it just didn't fly. Would we do it?”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“company with recurring revenue right i mean i i it's a it's the free software company with recurring revenue is a joke is an in-house joke at raspberry pi i i talk to an investor once and uh and he said i described all the cool stuff we do and that this is you know we have this and because you know it's all very well being a software company recurring revenue but he but sooner or later somebody needs to be making hard actually there's a business opportunity right if everyone wants to become a software company there's a huge business opportunity in not doing that in being a hardware company and we want to see this investor and he's like yeah you guys are great but you know you should totally pivot to being a software company recurring revenue we don't currently so currently we're interested in the software for us is entirely a cost center and as i said we're mostly a software company so so the vast majority of our company is of our engineering payroll is effectively servicing a cost center which is interesting we actually did try”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know, we couldn't sell Raspberry Pis in South Africa for a year once because their version of the FCC burnt down, their office burnt down, and they had a huge backlog. And no one could ship new electronic products in South Africa for a year. So you end up being exposed to all of these weird vulnerabilities and you also just end up spending a huge amount of money on $3,000 or $4,000 per country on testing. So all of these things are expensive and they all are basically powered by cell vast numbers of units. And obviously the numbers for semiconductor products are much higher because the number of cents you make on each unit is much lower and the upfront costs are proportionally.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it cost, I don't know what, Project New RP2040. I do. It's probably like $5 million or something. The answers you sell a lot of them. And that's the answer with all Raspberry Pi products, right? They are murderously expensive to design, particularly the modern big Raspberry Pis that have radios on. One thing we do is we go and do radio conformance everywhere. Raspberry Pi form is a legal conformant radio emitting product in Tanzania. We take every product everywhere and that actually piles up a few thousand dollars at a time. That piles up to just the radio conformance for a modern Raspberry Pi product is the best buy of half a million.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the heartlights associated with that. So that's, I'm trying to get to over because I said five to ten. I'm trying to get over five and I think I got over five”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you have operations, then I have operations roles, which are effectively about managing the process of getting wafers from a foundry. Good luck with that this year. Actually, we could create support from our foundry partners, but it is clearly, we can feel in all sorts of ways how tight the semiconductor supply chain is this year, getting them sawn up, put them into packages, tested, put into reels, out to the customer when one of them fails at the customer, get it back from the customer, do failure analysis on it to figure out why it's not working. Oh, qualification and characterization as well. So there are roles for sort of understanding, there are elements of the spec that you really actually do need to do post hoc. So, you know, how much current can I drive out of this pin if I'm driving this much current out of this pin, what does the voltage end up being? How much power does the thing consume? Things that have to be done experimentally so there are roles there as well. And then building all of the hardware, designing and building...”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chip and synthesizing that to make gates net list and then taking that net list and laying those gates out on the chip in a way that causes the signals to propagate through the chip in time to run your target clock speed because effectively your clock speed defines a window of time within which you must do everything in a synchronous design. DFT design for testability. So this is where verification is about checking that the chip as designed meets the specification designed for testability means once I have a chip that's come back from the fab, can I check whether this is a good one or not because a percent, 5%, 10% of chips will be bad chips and do you want to be able to discriminate between a good chip and a bad chip very quickly on a piece of automatic test equipment and so you design structures that go into the chip testability structures, DFT structures which effectively let you exercise a substantial majority of the”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, let's see. Digital front end design. So writing verilogue, putting your chip together. Structured testing. So getting via one of several different means, ensuring that your chip is verified, verifiable and verified. So we'll do to some approximation, we'll do what it says on the tin. And of course there is always a little bit of, you write a spec for the chip and then you make the chip and you do your best to make sure that it conforms to the spec and then you get the chip back and then you actually write down what the chip does. That's the spec. Hopefully they're fairly close to each other. But there's always a little bit of retrofitting of post hoc retrofitting of what you meant to do. So yeah, there's a verification and there are sort of several allied roles in verification, a synthesis, so sort of floor planning synthesis, place and route, static timing analysis and timing closure. So effectively taking the low level spec of the chip so the Verilog, the synthesizable spec of the chip.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, making chips is hard, but it's not that hard. If you've got the right people, it's one of those weird things, actually, which is... It's either impossible, trivial is the wrong word, but it's either impossible or tractable or really surprisingly tractable. And what that depends on is whether you have the right people. And there are, let's say, there are 10 roles, between five and ten distinct activities involved in going from the idea of a chip to something that's shipping at scale and is reliable. And if you have one person in each of those boxes, I mean, if you're going to build an M1, if you're Apple, you're going to build an M1 to power your MacBook. You need a lot more people in each of those boxes. But if you want to build a chip that's relatively simple, as long as you have one person who is extremely skilled in each of those boxes, it goes from being impossible to being tractable. If you're missing one box, two boxes, three boxes, it goes back from being tractable to being functionally impossible.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arduino product and they just go by chips. That means that it's very hard to justify doing software engineering if you're not going to use hard to make an investment if you're not going to get the return. And so it turns out in microcontroller space that the winning move is to be the microcontroller vendor. And if you're not, the microcontroller vendor, then it's very hard to make that work as a business model. There are very few companies have made making microcontroller-based boards work. And so really RP2040 is that. It provides Raspberry Pi with an opportunity to build microcontroller boards, to make very substantial investments in software engineering, but then to have some skin in the game in terms of the result. It means that every RP2040 base board has a little cut for Raspberry Pi. And it's important in closing the business model and justifying the return on investment.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The team here had always struggled, I think. There's a constraint that you can build the things you want to buy, but you obviously have to build things that are going to make money as well. And one of the challenges with building something in the microcontroller space, which has always been an ambition for the team here, or something that I was deeply involved with, is that if you build a platform on somebody else's microcontroller platform, you're creating value for the microcontroller vendor, not for yourself. And so an Arduino create enormous value for their vendor, which tends to be microchip. So they do a lot of software engineering, and then there is then a world of clone devices that use the same chips and leverage their software investments for free. And there is when people design products around the Arduino software environment, they then go to, when they go to scale, they disintermediate the”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the best way to do it, actually, if you want to do it, is to plug a Raspberry Pi into this, is to go buy a Raspberry Pi Pico, which is last year, last year's product, the ultra low in the $4 microcontroller-based board. You just got to plug that into your Mac or your PC and use that to move objects around the world. So we ended up even, I think, kind of solving the problem for physical computing with traditional objects. As well.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I would say in terms of your thesis, right, this will beguile you into doing something. If you want to move pixels around a screen, right, the iPhone developer environment is available to you and you can get an app on your phone Sure, but like you Right? If you want to move an atom around the world and you're looking at your Mac or your PC or your phone, there's no way to do it.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which is fun as a software engineer. I mean, I was a software engineer. Big surprises for me with Raspberry Pi was that you have a, people do different things in education space. People do not do with their Raspberry Pi what I expected them to do. So I expected people to write computer games because that's what I did when I was a child. In practice, people build robots. The interesting thing that kids find moving atoms around in the world much more interesting than moving pixels around on the screen. It's interestingly, it seems like we're producing more for a company that thinks that software engineering is where all the jobs are, it feels like we're producing a generation of hardware, of mechatronics engineers, basically, of hardware engineers.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I find this out every time I talk to someone from a hardware company. We just have the CEO of Sonos on the show, and he said, We have more software engineers than hardware engineers. We had the CTO John Deere make tractors. He's like, we have more software engineers. It just seems like that's a universal rule. You have to have more software engineers than hardware engineers.”
2022-03-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT