Broadcom releases SoC graphics driver source

Posted Mar 1, 2014 0:29 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
Parent article: Broadcom releases SoC graphics driver source

This sentence is interesting: "To mark the Raspberry Pi’s second anniversary, the Foundation has put challenge up to the community: It’s offering $10,000 to the first person that can port Broadcom’s VideoCore drivers to run on the Pi."

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Right, with that kind of money...

Posted Mar 1, 2014 3:40 UTC (Sat) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632) [Link] (2 responses)

10,000 dollars can buy approximately 250 Raspberries. Which can in turn become a massive graphics farm!

(Hummmm... How powerful is this Broadcom thingy next to, say, a decent nVidia with Noveau?)

Right, with that kind of money...

Posted Mar 1, 2014 3:50 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I expect it is much slower than a discrete NVIDIA GPU, even with nouveau drivers.

Right, with that kind of money...

Posted Mar 1, 2014 11:42 UTC (Sat) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

It claims 24 GFLOPS. (Per the just-released documentation, the architecture is based on a QPU (a 4-way SIMD processor that does one multiply and one non-multiply instruction per cycle), at 250MHz. There are 4 QPUs per slice, and 3 slices in the chip, and 4*2*250M*4*3 = 24G.)

So $10K will get you 6 TFLOPS. That's apparently the same as about 3 GeForce GTX 760, which will cost about $750 (and which have far more flexible GPGPU support). If you have the money and power and want raw compute performance, you should probably stick with NVIDIA.

Of course the GTX 760 doesn't scale down to the cost and power requirements that the RPi's chip was designed for. And if you want to learn how to hack around on graphics drivers, the RPi is probably a pretty good place to start now, since the hardware looks much simpler than modern desktop GPUs.

Given the amount of effort many people have put into reverse-engineering other mobile GPU architectures, I think it would be great if this release of documentation and code led to serious work from the open source community on decent RPi Linux drivers, to demonstrate to Broadcom and other vendors that releasing this kind of information is going to be worthwhile for them and that they should do more of it.