The part about the ARM core not being open source is a joke. Would it be better to teach children and students about esoteric open source architectures with no applications in the real world?
The real problem of the Pi, and not just as far as education use is concerned, is the crap Broadcom chip. After working with Broadcom, I would never-ever-ever consider them if there is an alternative. They strangle open source (which is shooting yourself in the foot, really, being that the community produces the best drivers out there), don't release documentation and won't even sell you the actual part unless you were buying millions.
The chip itself is outdated, bug ridden (Synopsys DWC USB, anyone? I'm making good money debugging the drivers of this DWC USB for my customers - one with a proprietary ASIC and one with an obscure Chinese craplet chip - so I know first hand how bad it can get, especially with the earlier versions) and has very lacking, if any, documentation available.
TI are the polar opposite of Broadcom in these regards: they nurture the open source community and encourage it to use their processors (Pandaboard ES contains a very high end OMAP4460, same processor as Galaxy Nexus and the weird sphere Nexus media thingy), providing near complete documentation and lots of technical knowledge.
The Pi design team essentially chose a bad foundation just to grab some headlines with their lowball pricing. Now people are slowly realizing how bad of a platform it really is.
A side effect of the Broadcom attitude is that even with a full manufacturing file for the Pi, no one can reproduce the design when the CPU can't be sourced. So much for openness.
I'm waiting for one of the mainstream manufacturers (TI, Freescale, Samsung to a lesser extent) to pick this up and sponsor a super low cost, basic board. The benefit to their commercial customers from the creation of a broad community and code base would be immediate and immense.
Right, but after designing the first ARM (on a BBC Micro), and ARM was spun out of Acorn into a separate company, Sophie Wilson went to work for Broadcom on their Firepath DSP chip. So all these guys are connected.
>esoteric open source architectures with no applications in the real world
Why does an open source architecture have to be esoteric? It could just as easily be conventional. We don't know for sure that ARM will be as popular in the future. Presumably aim isn't to teach individual intricacies but rather the overall concepts.
First, what's being taught should be applicable to the real world. That means that if you are to produce useful and productive graduates, getting them familiar with ARM is much better than anything else out there.
Second, even if you had a similarly performing architecture, unless some major manufacturer with deep pockets picks it up and fabricates a chip around it, there's not much you could do with it outside of FPGA experimentation (for something that can mimic the power and peripherals of the Pi, with all its shortcomings, you're like to need a multi $k Virtex FPGA).
Third, ARM is friendly enough to its partners and the ecosystem that it won't be going away for a long, long time. It's a reasonably open company as far as documentation goes, and do their share of community contribution. ARM was smart enough to grant architectural licenses to the only companies rich and smart enough to make their own architectures (Marvell, Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and a few others), so they can spawn their own variants while still retaining standard ARM compatibility.
I don't see any company seriously threatening ARM's dominance for at least a decade. If you want to do embedded systems or mobile (and soon servers) low-level, you need to know ARM.
The real problem of the Pi, and not just as far as education use is concerned, is the crap Broadcom chip. After working with Broadcom, I would never-ever-ever consider them if there is an alternative. They strangle open source (which is shooting yourself in the foot, really, being that the community produces the best drivers out there), don't release documentation and won't even sell you the actual part unless you were buying millions.
The chip itself is outdated, bug ridden (Synopsys DWC USB, anyone? I'm making good money debugging the drivers of this DWC USB for my customers - one with a proprietary ASIC and one with an obscure Chinese craplet chip - so I know first hand how bad it can get, especially with the earlier versions) and has very lacking, if any, documentation available.
TI are the polar opposite of Broadcom in these regards: they nurture the open source community and encourage it to use their processors (Pandaboard ES contains a very high end OMAP4460, same processor as Galaxy Nexus and the weird sphere Nexus media thingy), providing near complete documentation and lots of technical knowledge.
The Pi design team essentially chose a bad foundation just to grab some headlines with their lowball pricing. Now people are slowly realizing how bad of a platform it really is.
A side effect of the Broadcom attitude is that even with a full manufacturing file for the Pi, no one can reproduce the design when the CPU can't be sourced. So much for openness.
I'm waiting for one of the mainstream manufacturers (TI, Freescale, Samsung to a lesser extent) to pick this up and sponsor a super low cost, basic board. The benefit to their commercial customers from the creation of a broad community and code base would be immediate and immense.