Live data from Hacker News

A birthday present from Broadcom

raspberrypi.org

21–30 of 170 posts

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#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...

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#24
I'm building an environment for computer vision, and I recently made a client that can run on the rpi (two minute video if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSigkvbpb_Q). I'm not exactly sure what possibilities this opens up, but I'm definitely going to dig into it and find out.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#25
Proud to have worked on this during my 8-month internship at Broadcom. It remains one of the toughest and rewarding projects to tackle within the company. I am pleasantly surprised to see Broadcom open up like this and release the full documentation. A step in the right direction for a grossly under-rated company.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#26

> "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).

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#28
post #13

This is a step in the right direction. Does this mean that the RaspberryPi can run blob-free now or with one less blob? I don't know what else is needed for the SoC to operate.

From the article - "This isn’t the end of the road for us: there are still significant parts of the multimedia hardware on BCM2835 which are only accessible via the blob."

Ah, thanks. Poor reading comprehension on my part.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#29

> "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).

(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 of (b).

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#30

I wonder if anything GPGPU will become of this... I'm thinking it's probably not possible. OpenCL?

One of the bullet points on the broadcom blog post is: "Write general-purpose code leveraging the GPU compute capability on VideoCore devices"

Keen eye (and mind).. Thanks.
Post reply on HN