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A birthday present from Broadcom

raspberrypi.org

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Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#91

Post by AceJohnny2 »

DougMerritt wrote: post #82
akiselev wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> generally older and more experienced, and thus apparently can't be taught new tricks. Ah yes, experience, the bane of all technical projects. I have worked at lots of hardware companies over the years, and to varying degrees, they universally treat software as the red headed stepchild -- an unfortunate necessity akin to paying taxes, or worse.

Hahaha! Ha! Haa...

And that's why I no longer work for a semiconductor company.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#92

Post by sneak »

ansible wrote: post #84
sneak wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whatever RasPi is, the fact remains that they're selling a relatively open platform at price near production costs. And that platform just got significantly more open. And they are now offering a bounty for the creation (refinement, really) of more free software. Which will benefit the entire community surrounding the RasPi. So that is good. Even if they were offering $10 USD, there might be someone who'll take up th…

"Relatively open" in the way that your mother was "relatively pregnant" when you were born?

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#93

Post by ozim »

embedded wrote: post #85
akiselev wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, armchair engineer, you sound like you really know what you're talking about. When this old engineer worked on embedded MIPS cores and 802.11[abgn] at Broadcom, everything was under source code control. This was pre-git, so I think we were using cvs. How the hell do you conclude that releasing a zip file means the engineers don't use source code control?

Those kids on HN think that everything cool was invented last summer by some new college grad, funny thing is most of stuff was already invented in 70's but who would care about prehistory of computing.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#94

Post by bdamm »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #89
embedded wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, armchair engineer, you sound like you really know what you're talking about. When this old engineer worked on embedded MIPS cores and 802.11[abgn] at Broadcom, everything was under source code control. This was pre-git, so I think we were using cvs. How the hell do you conclude that releasing a zip file means the engineers don't use source code control?

The fashion of the day is, for better or worse, "if you don't have a github you ain't shit."

git is overkill for facilities with small groups working in a common area (not hard to imagine if you're in the hardware biz) and all the engineers are used to cvs command syntax..

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#95

Post by bodski »

ebenupton wrote: post #45
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will running without relying on blobs mean that processing can be further optimised or is it more of a moral victory than a technical progression. I'm assuming doing away with the shim means that there is some gain but in practical terms is it likely to be quite minimal? Will there be routines accessible that weren't accessible via the shim?

More a moral victory from my PoV. Remember, code that runs in the blob is running on another processor, so not costing you ARM cycles. That's why we've set the Quake fps target much lower than what you can hit with the blob.

Thanks for all the effort to get to this stage Eben. As someone who was repeatedly told (on the RP forums) that I had no business to desire the user-land graphics to be open-sourced, and that only hardware engineers would get any benefit from this code, I thought this day would never come!

I'm happy to be proved wrong, and happy that many little 'RasPis' will have an extended lifespan from this decision by your employer. :-)

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#96

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

sneak wrote: post #58
dredge wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

>So, in a way, this "charity" is really just a marketing subsidiary of Broadcom.

You could look at it that way if you like. But if you compare the rPi to the comparable low-priced educational development boards available when the project started (none). You might conclude that their marketing effort had a good and very real effect on the availability of low-cost edu dev-kits for both Broadcom SoC products and others' as well (like the BBB). So, as both an educator and Open Source advocate, I am fairly pleased with the rPi project, and even if it isn't exactly what I would have wished for I can't imagine how it could have been more successful or had a better result.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#98

Post by pm90 »

Elv13 wrote: post #90
samolang wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of an 8-month internship. What sort of program is that? Like a semester+summer?

My university (Montreal ETS) also do it. They have 3 (real/full) semesters per years. Students usually take 1 of them per year to work as interns. You can technically work as intern for like 5 years and still be considered enrolled into the engineering program. Students will either prefer 8 months internship for well paid jobs or jobs that cannot be done in a 4 months development cycle(like a video game). In the end,…

Its a sweet deal for companies if you think about it. Maybe benefits are different in Canada, since I heard that the Govt. provides healthcare, but in the US, the employer has to provide that. Plus, more salary, 401(k) etcetc.

Actually, from another viewpoint, for small companies its very beneficial to hire interns; they can be used to work on projects which might be interesting but have low financial returns.

Which leads me to conclude that > 3 month internships should perhaps be allowed only if you're working at a startup, or small-scale shops that can't really (I mean really really) afford to pay you. For a company like Broadcomm, that doesn't make sense.

Of course, this is just my subjective viewpoint. I'm inclined to believe that my sense of justice might be very skewed.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#99

Post by malkia »

marincounty wrote: post #26
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #4

> "Earlier today, Broadcom announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license. The source release targets the BCM21553 cellphone chip, but it should be reasonably straightforward to port this to the BCM2835, allowing access to the graphics core without using the blob. As an incentive to do this work, we will…

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).

It could be that $10,000 is the amount some mid-to-high level manager can probably write off.

Also $10,000 is a significant amount of money.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#100

Post by nickbauman »

sneak wrote: post #58
dredge wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

In that case everyone in the industry is a charity case. Almost every invention, from the advent of integrated circuits, digital signal processors, LCD displays, even Google all the way up to the Internet itself — came from publicly funded research projects. In the computer industry in particular the "you didn't build that" claim is probably more true than anywhere else. Shoulders of giants, folks.
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