Have you guys really been reading about the raspberry pi? The founder is an SoC architect at Broadcom, I'm sure they'll find a reputable and cost effective manufacturing partner with their industry contacts.
Yes, I've been reading their stuff. And I'm hoping they are wildly successful! But I had to chuckle at your comment that their founder is an SoC architect because it reminded me of a really funny moment at this company I helped start back in the mid 90's. We had this new PCI card that we were getting manufactured for our systems and the guy who designed it was complaining about the delays in getting cards to put into test systems. Our director of manufacturing was really pissed off at the emails he was dealing with asking why things weren't ready and his response was along the lines of
"... some architect designs something and thinks that I can just bend over and pull a few thousand out of my ass. Doesn't he get that someone has to build the fucking thing and then somehow we have get them here?"
It was my first exposure to the more sordid details of getting a piece of hardware from prototype into production. For years up to that point I could easily get 10 or 100 of something made, but I hadn't ever tried to get 10,000 made, or had contracts in place to have them made on a regular basis.
Manufacturing acuity is not in the standard make up of senior technical people, its a process puzzle but with people rather than logic, with regulations rather than resource constraints, and with cash rather than electricity. The art of creating streams of parts which arrive at facility to take part in a process of assembly (and perhaps sub assembly) test and delivery, is a very different skill than designing an SoC.
That being said, its an amazing sight to behold when its all working right, sort of an eternal Rube Goldberg machine. And some folks make it look effortless.
