RP2040: Paving the way for Intel on the SBC Market

This is an opinion article where I explain why I believe that the RP2040 chip from the Raspberry Pi Foundation just opened the door for Intel to be an important player on the SBC market. At the same time the Pi Foundation may enter other profitable businesses typically held by FTDI.

For years the Raspberry Pi dominated the SBC market, some people might even say it was a monopoly because when it comes to the hobbyist market it is the only plug-and-play solution. As Jeff Geerling usually puts it, you can get a bunch of Raspberry Pi replacement and it might work but won’t boot out of the box, the GPIO might not work with the libraries and software you’re used to etc.

What’s the RP2040

The RP2040 is a microcontroller from Raspberry Pi, think of it as an Atmega or an ESP32 that was made to handle the low level electronics of the Raspberry Pi board like GPIO, SPI, I2C, PWM etc. previously baked into the Pi’s Broadcom CPU.

There are numerous advantages to this separation, flexibility, reliability, simpler designs, more space for computing cores and overall cost reduction as the CPU don’t need to worry about those signals.

What About Intel?

Up until now, Intel has struggled to enter the SBC market – not due to power or price, as many believe, but because their CPUs lacked integrated GPIO, I2C, and SPI support, along with the necessary software support.

This chip makes it so software/library compatibility is no longer a barrier to other CPU makers to enter the market – even Rockchip and Mediatek SBCs can use the RP2040 and gain instant software compatibility with any software library made for the Raspberry Pi GPIO. Currently, when Rockchip releases an SBC, it takes time for libraries to adapt to their specific GPIO definitions, delaying full software support. With the RP2040, this gap can be significantly reduced, allowing for quicker adoption and broader compatibility across different boards.

By adding the low-cost RP2040 to any Intel system they can now offer these features without altering their architecture, while also benefiting from immediate software support from the vast range of libraries and code already developed for the Raspberry Pi.

In short, the irony of the RP2040 is that it kills the competitive advantage that the Raspberry Pi guys worked hard to build up.

Why Give Up?

The Pi may lose its biggest completive advantage however the company also gains an entire new market, the bridge market.

The GPIO/SPI/I2C bridge market, traditionally dominated by FTDI, plays a crucial role in connecting low-level hardware like microcontrollers to computers. Many peripherals we interact with rely on these bridges for simple or complex operations, ranging from toggling LEDs to signal processing and transmission.

Broadcom, now a major investor in the Raspberry Pi Foundation also has a multitude of hardware solutions that frequently requires these types of bridges.

It’s plausible that Broadcom may have influenced the Pi Foundation to explore this direction. From a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense: the SBC market provides a controlled testing ground for these chips. If Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 and similar chips perform well in this context, proving reliable and as effective as FTDI bridges, Broadcom could deploy them on a much wider scale across its hardware portfolio – at a significantly reduced cost. The potential savings could be substantial, making this a win-win for both Broadcom and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which will be selling millions of those chips.