Broadcom. They get a lot of kickbacks from the British government, AFAIK.
Edit: Not sure why downvoted. Broadcom very much is able to write off a ton as donations to charity, since the rpi foundation is a British charity. They also get sweet heart deals from the UK based on that. The UK gets the ability to put a passable personal computer on every child's desk, like they've been attempting to do since the BBC micro days.
If you count your engineers' spare time as billable hours donated to charity, and then sell the chips to that charity at cost, but write off the profit as charitable donations to reduce your overall tax burden, you sure do. Particularly for chips that weren't going to be sold anyway (the original SoC was from a Roku like device that had been EoLed and Broadcom had been left with a surplus of the chips they didn't know what to do with).
Which I'm not counting as a negative. This is successful example of charitable giving where everyone wins.
Just because Kramer didn't know the process behind writing things off, doesn't mean that there isn't a real process and it isn't being used in this case.
This is the whole reason why the rpi foundation is a charity, to allow these financial structures.
> Just because Kramer didn't know the process behind writing things off, doesn't mean that there isn't a real process and it isn't being used in this case.
I'm not saying it isn't a real process. I'm saying it isn't magic. Reducing your taxable income by $1,000 doesn't mean you save $1,000.
But marking your engineers' spare time as donated since your contract owns everything they produce anyway, and selling chips at cost and marking the profit as a donation when you were probably going to take a loss on them does in fact net you ahead.
IDK, even rpi4 is still on 28nm which is the cheapest process per gate right now. And they really have very few gates allthibgs considered. I could absolutely see somewhere between $5 and $10 at cost, not counting R&D.
Where are British schoolchildren getting these Pis? Mine aren’t. The school where my sister works isn’t giving them out, either.
The closest I’ve seen to what you describe was a BBC Microbit my son was given as part of holiday club but that was sponsored by Maxell, not the British government, Broadcom, or anyone else.
Disclaimer: I am a STEM Ambassador (volunteering position) in West Sussex, working with local schools and libraries on IT projects, including using the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi isn't a giveaway item and so schools need to make an investment in hardware or obtain sponsorship to kit out their STEM resources with them.
1M BBC micro:bits were distributed free to Yr 7 pupils as part of a project in 2016 - schools had to register/apply at the time, so if your school did not participate their pupils would not have received anything, however, as you have mentioned, other sponsorship also made units available.
Best have a word with your school's STEM/Technology people to see how they are supplementing your children's curriculum with technology resources.
Can you elaborate on this? Who is subsidising the Pi, and why?