The Broadcom SoCs used in the RPi's are not "good stuff" at all - they are one of the worst pieces of junk I have ever had the displeasure of using.
They are extremely unstable, and if you want any kind of moderately reliable deployment of an RPi, you need to use a watchdog timer to reset the device if it freezes. Except - guess what - the watchdog timer itself is broken on the RPi! (As of the last time I tried this, iirc with an RPi 4) Either it's busted in hardware or the driver is broken. Most semi-high-reliability devices built using RPis have elected to use external watchdogs, which is super annoying and would not be necessary on a correctly designed SoC.
Their clocking and boot schemes are also totally insane garbage, with random peripherals breaking if you change the GPU clock, and with the GPU silicon running the bootloader or something ridiculous like that.
I would prefer almost any other ARM SoC to the BCM used in the RPi.
And the lack of 3D accelerated video with rpi4. I wish I knew about these prior purchasing rpi. There is a good market for small form general purpose computer with 4g ram + decent gpu. I am still not sure if Intel’s NUC would worth a try in this category.
They are extremely unstable, and if you want any kind of moderately reliable deployment of an RPi, you need to use a watchdog timer to reset the device if it freezes. Except - guess what - the watchdog timer itself is broken on the RPi! (As of the last time I tried this, iirc with an RPi 4) Either it's busted in hardware or the driver is broken. Most semi-high-reliability devices built using RPis have elected to use external watchdogs, which is super annoying and would not be necessary on a correctly designed SoC.
Their clocking and boot schemes are also totally insane garbage, with random peripherals breaking if you change the GPU clock, and with the GPU silicon running the bootloader or something ridiculous like that.
I would prefer almost any other ARM SoC to the BCM used in the RPi.