Worth a read

Posted Aug 31, 2011 22:34 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Worth a read by TommyAtkins
Parent article: Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later

> How would anyone other than ARM know that?

I am sure you can make a good guess.

> That trade-off only works in linux's favour if you are paying for the core which runs your firmware, but not the one running linux. If you are SoC vendor, it's the same either way.

IP blocks making a SoC are designed by different teams, sometimes even different companies, each trying to minimize its corresponding cost. And the cost of running a slightly more complicated driver on the main CPU is usually zero.

If you look in history I think you will see that the cases where hardware takes more features on board are only driven by performance concerns.

PS: A large number of chip designers do not care a bit about any hardware/software trade-off. If they can push stuff to software to save money they will do it.