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Free drivers for ARM graphics

Free drivers for ARM graphics

Posted Sep 27, 2013 19:02 UTC (Fri) by arnd (subscriber, #8866)
In reply to: Free drivers for ARM graphics by pabs
Parent article: Free drivers for ARM graphics

There are also technical issues with SGX, to the point that people are being discouraged of even looking at it.

There are other GPUs that have an even smaller market share and nobody working on them:

* Creative Labs / Ziilabs (formerly 3D Labs) ZMS: almost nonexisting in the market, so nobody bothered reverse engineering so far, but interesting technoloy. Part of Ziilabs was apparently sold to Intel last year.

* Samsung "fimg": this was the first reverse-engineering project for an ARM GPU, now at https://github.com/tom3q/openfimg/wiki, but unfortunately Samsung abandoned their own GPU design before it had a chance to get anywhere. The s3c64xx/s5p64xx SoCs were once popular but this was in the ARM11/ARMv6 age.

* Broadcom VideoCore IV. The Raspberry Pi was already mentioned, which uses VideoCore IV as the "main" CPU and an ARM11 to run Linux. There are actually phone SoCs based on modern ARM cores with VideoCore IV used exclusively as the GPU. I don't think there is any work on free GPU drivers for those chips, although reverse-engineering the instruction set (as someone mentioned in another post here) is certainly going to help.

* HTC bought the "S3" GPU division from VIA some time ago. Chances are that they are planning to come out with a new SoC for HTC phones with their own GPU at some point. At the moment those are just rumors at best,
so no software (neither proprietary nor free).

* IIRC WonderMedia had their own GPU at some point but moved to Mali now. I don't know any details, but I assume this was a fixed-function GPU, no programmable shaders.

* Digital Media Professionals Inc. has an OpenGL ES3.0 GPU called SMAPH that is used in some Renesas SoCs, and an earlier GPU that was used in the Nintendo 3DS. That's all I know about them.

* Takumi has an OpenGL ES2.0 GPU called gs3000. No word about their customers.


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