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Update: Nope, no video dataUpdate: Nope, no video dataPosted Feb 8, 2012 8:23 UTC (Wed) by mjr (guest, #6979)In reply to: Update: Nope, no video data by ringerc Parent article: Upton: Raspberry Pi: Two things you thought you weren’t going to get
Yeah, it's a positive surprise they went this far. The best hope for a freely supported widespread embedded GPU though is probably the Lima reverse-engineering project for supporting ARM's Mali GPU series. They have some initial rendering successes and the GPU is reportedly a pretty clean design and easy to code for, though they still have their work cut out for them (and the cheap Mali boards will probably have to wait a bit longer too). Somebody actually supporting their GPU with free code, if even just on the Linux side and keeping their firmware blobs, would obviously be better, but...
The ethernet on the B model is indeed an external SMSC LAN9512. A pretty nifty chip for what it does: it hooks up to the SoC's USB interface (exposed directly on the ethernetless Pi A model), and contains a 3-way USB hub with the ethernet on one internal USB bus and two of the ports exposed externally: http://www.smsc.com/index.php?tid=300&pid=135
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Update: Nope, no video data Posted Feb 8, 2012 9:57 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
There is a (relatively cheap) dev board with a Mali 400 GPU, the ST-Ericsson Snowball (http://igloocommunity.org/). It isn't as cheap as a Raspberry but it's a completely different beast (dual Cortex-A9 at 1GH, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, Ethernet, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc. etc.) and the smaller version doesn't cost much more than a Pandaboard ES.
Snowball Posted Feb 8, 2012 10:17 UTC (Wed) by mjr (guest, #6979) [Link]
Yeah, that's not bad for what you get, though as you said, a bit in a different category than Pi. There'll probably be more variety in Mali boards too before the Lima driver (hopefully...) matures, towards the lower end too. For anyone willing and able to hack towards it Snowball seems nice now though ;)
Snowball Posted Feb 8, 2012 14:17 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
The project to watch is actually this one: http://rhombus-tech.net/
Their chosen CPU for "mass market" purposes also supports the Mali GPU architecture, so I imagine that if they continue to make progress, we might see sufficiently open hardware in a similar price bracket in the not too distant future.
Snowball Posted Feb 8, 2012 22:12 UTC (Wed) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]
Yeah, that *looks* great, but the thing is RPi has much more convincing story/people behind it. History is filled with projects/companies that don't deliver.
RPi has convinced me, I believe them when they say that they will ship next month. Other projects need to do a lot of trust building before I take them seriously. That rhombus-tech site is filled with great visions and lofty goals, but no real price or shipping date. I certainly don't believe the 15$ price.
Snowball Posted Feb 9, 2012 14:11 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Sure, Raspberry Pi has a few names you've heard of behind it - that potentially raises other "trust issues", depending on which names are the ones you recognise - but having read a bit more background and having met one of the main players in a different context, I don't see the Rhombus Tech people giving up so easily. I also respect the fact that they're surveying and documenting the hardware landscape rather thoroughly. You also see this going on, perhaps in a slightly less coherent or convenient fashion, around other open hardware initiatives, so even if the stated project doesn't work out there is a body of knowledge that others can work with. As for the "convincing story" behind Raspberry Pi, aside from reservations about such devices being the right vehicle for teaching computing concepts (in what amounts to a replay of the microcomputing era), I see a lot more enthusiasm from bystanders for a potential source of cheap media centre hardware than for the stated educational goals. In addition, it's still a single vendor show: creating an open standard doesn't seem to be part of the agenda (which would arguably be one of the lessons to learn from the microcomputer era). Since the hardware aspect of Raspberry Pi is also communicated largely as a done deal, alternative initiatives seem more attractive to me because they potentially widen the competence of the community and make it more likely that we'll be able to maintain access to a range of devices friendly to Free Software, rather than depend on vendors cutting one-off deals.
Snowball Posted Feb 9, 2012 19:28 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
if you can run linux on it, hardware standardisation is less important. In fact having different groups offer hardware with different capabilities, but all able to run linux, seems like a good thing to me.
Rhombus tech Posted Feb 11, 2012 17:52 UTC (Sat) by justincormack (subscriber, #70439) [Link]
The Rhombus Tech project is much more of a community project. If you want to help make it happen then join in.
Update: Nope, no video data Posted Feb 8, 2012 17:02 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Personally, I look forward to seeing Intel's in-house replacement for the third-party Poulsbo/GMA500 chipset they licensed. From what I've seen so far, they plan to produce a simplified version of the Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge GPU, with low power usage and video acceleration, and make it as open as the existing Intel first-party GPUs.
Intel's in-house replacement for Poulsbo/GMA500 Posted Feb 8, 2012 21:18 UTC (Wed) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]
Any links on this? Thanks.
Intel's in-house replacement for Poulsbo/GMA500 Posted Feb 8, 2012 21:43 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Checking again, it looks like all the reports I've seen about that trace back to a single Phoronix article (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MT...) which doesn't actually cite its sources. Sorry for unintentionally propagating unsubstantiated rumors.
Intel's in-house replacement for Poulsbo/GMA500 Posted Feb 9, 2012 1:46 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
That project died. Intel is going to continue licensing graphics cores from PowerVR (the one that made Poulsbo) for low power products like atom and will probably keep doing their bad inhouse designs for integration into the top end CPU's. After following Intel's graphics efforts for a decade I can say with fair certainty that they will keep announcing graphics products and then keep killing them before they see the light of day. They've done it more times than I can count. The low watt design didn't even last a year before they decided it was just cheaper to use PowerVR designs (of course they waited till after the Poulsbo backlash died down).
http://vr-zone.com/articles/exclusive-intel-s-cedarview-a...
As noted in the article, the SGX535 is an upgraded version of the SGX500 that IS paulsbo. Though that isn't the best link you can probably google a better article using the keywords "intel powervr SGX". I should also note that PowerVR designs are very common in android cellular phones, so the driver situation should be much improved from when the GMA500 came out, though I don't know for sure it will be better.
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