Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A birthday present from Broadcom

raspberrypi.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 170 posts

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#51

Post by CamperBob2 »

ansimionescu wrote: post #40
jxf wrote: post #21

If you want to go straight to the horse's mouth and just start hacking (this is Hacker News, after all!), the Broadcom downloads are here: * BCM21553 VideoCore IV graphics driver source: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/Brcm_Android_... * BCM21553 VideoCore IV documentation: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-A...

Good ol' gzip download, because fuck source control. edit: FWIW, a friend who works there told me flat-out to just avoid them (I'm job-hunting)

Look gift horses in the mouth much?

Why "avoid" them?

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#52

Post by petermonsson »

ansimionescu wrote: post #40
jxf wrote: post #21

If you want to go straight to the horse's mouth and just start hacking (this is Hacker News, after all!), the Broadcom downloads are here: * BCM21553 VideoCore IV graphics driver source: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/Brcm_Android_... * BCM21553 VideoCore IV documentation: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-A...

Good ol' gzip download, because fuck source control. edit: FWIW, a friend who works there told me flat-out to just avoid them (I'm job-hunting)

It is open source. You can put it on Github if you want to.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#53

Post by CamperBob2 »

Argorak wrote: post #46

Celebrate the open source release of the drivers by giving out a price for making a non-free software run on it? Also one that the intended audience of the hardware is not allowed to play? Seems a bit odd. (The Quake 3 engine is open source and free nowadays, but the assets and maps are not, so you cannot run "Quake 3" without using the demo. So "Quake 3" is non-free.)

Who, other than certain parents with opinions they can't scientifically justify, says anyone isn't "allowed to play" Quake 3?

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#54

Post by nandhp »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #51
ansimionescu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good ol' gzip download, because fuck source control. edit: FWIW, a friend who works there told me flat-out to just avoid them (I'm job-hunting)

Look gift horses in the mouth much? Why "avoid" them?

It sounds like ansimionescu might have been told that Broadcom isn't a good place to work.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#55

Post by akiselev »

ansimionescu wrote: post #40
jxf wrote: post #21

If you want to go straight to the horse's mouth and just start hacking (this is Hacker News, after all!), the Broadcom downloads are here: * BCM21553 VideoCore IV graphics driver source: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/Brcm_Android_... * BCM21553 VideoCore IV documentation: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-A...

Good ol' gzip download, because fuck source control. edit: FWIW, a friend who works there told me flat-out to just avoid them (I'm job-hunting)

This is almost a universal problem with firmware and chip engineers, who are generally older and more experienced, and thus apparently can't be taught new tricks. There are also issues with bureaucracies in each and every semiconductor company (which are on average decades old) so firmware is usually hot potatoed around by management and ends up lighting the customers' projects on fire almost every damn time. I don't have enough fingers to count how many times I've encountered problems in a project and wasted weeks treading water, eventually to find out that the code examples weren't tested, a parameter that closely effects very sensitive silicon isn't documented, or even that I can't so much as get the documentation for a licensed USB peripheral that is non EHCI compliant (who knew such a thing even existed anymore).

Everyone from Broadcom to Qualcomm (and many more) are guilty of this and it is a very rare treat to find a chip that is well documented with firmware and code examples that work and give you a full picture of what you can do and where the pitfalls are.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#56

Post by penguindev »

georgemcbay wrote: post #49

On the one hand as someone who owns half a dozen Raspberry Pis this is really cool news and I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth. On the other hand, ARM vendors really have to start opening everything up much more than they have or Intel is going to start eating their lunch in the small embedded Linux arena, and I suspect Intel's mobile resurgence with Bay Trail is at least partly behind this "gift" to us all.

I don't know anything about mobile, but I've been looking at replacing my htpc ION system (edit: not that it really needs it, frankly it works great) and fanless baytrail boards/cases look very interesting. More cost than a pi + pi codec licensing obviously - but not that much, and all open as you pointed out...

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#57

Post by wolfgke »

zurn wrote: post #44

> In common with every other ARM-based SoC, using the VideoCore IV 3d graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver The Lima driver for ARM Mali is open source and runs Quake 3!

> The Lima driver for ARM Mali is open source and runs Quake 3!

But the Lima driver was created by reverse engineering instead of using publicly available documentation.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#58

Post by sneak »

dredge wrote: post #29
marincounty wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just $10,000? Nice gesture, but they can afford to dig a little deeper. Their card running Quake III at reasonable frame rate on a Pi is a big deal, and these cheap skates know it. (I hope the person who figures it out, doesn't give them the code; just show them and collect $10,000 (A years rent in a bad part of Oakland).

(a) They are a charity. (b) They demonstrated the Pi running Quake 3 at a reasonable frame rate in 2011. There's a picture of it in the blog post. (c) The competition rules say "To submit an Entry, and Entrant shall email a link to a public GitHub repository containing the full source code for the Entry..." so just showing the result wouldn't be eligible to win. That and they already know what it looks like, because…

They aren't really a charity; they sell a product from a manufacturer (the Broadcom SoC) and were started by Broadcom employees. So, in a way, this "charity" is really just a marketing subsidiary of Broadcom.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#60

Post by xamlhacker »

ebenupton wrote: post #11
patrickyeon wrote: post #5

That's really a surprise. Broadcom is cemented in my mind as one of the hardest companies to get even basic datasheets out of. I know the saying is "don't look a gift horse in the mouth", but could it be that their graphics cores are not competitive in pure technical capabilities, so they've decided to compete on open-ness? I'm not really involved in that area of hardware/software.

Nope (though note, I'm biased for several reasons). In terms of performance per unit area and performance per Watt, VideoCore IV is about as good as you're going to get. There are chips with higher performance GPUs out there, but they get there by brute force: throwing area (and therefore cost) and/or power at the problem.

Waiting for the VideoCore V :) I noticed that the Broadcom LTE offerings such as the M320 do not use VideoCore and instead use PowerVR 5XT. Is it because they were originally Renesas designs? Hoping to see more VideoCore action in the future :)
Post reply on HN