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A birthday present from Broadcom

raspberrypi.org

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Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#41

Post by ebenupton »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #35
ebenupton wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two years ago (or whenever the BCM2835 itself came out on the market), sure, but surely things have improved since? We've at least jumped a technology node, and hasn't nVidia improved?

Less than you'd think. Other vendors have improved somewhat, but from often from pretty poor starting points. Jumping a process node is a "brute force" approach: we can all do that. I'm more interested in apples-to-apples comparisons on a given node.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#42

Post by cbhl »

samolang wrote: post #37
tejbirwason wrote: post #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.

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

Probably a co-op program with a University. the University of Waterloo often does 4-month and/or 8-month (depending on the program); the University of Toronto does 12-month, in partnership with companies that are looking to woo students before they've even finished their undergrad.

(Usually it involves the school designing the academic program and shifting when courses are offered (including putting courses in the spring/summer) to accommodate the work term.)

The grandparent appears to go to the University of British Columbia, judging from their profile.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#43

Post by ebenupton »

rwg wrote: post #36

But we’re incredibly proud that VideoCore IV is the first publicly documented mobile graphics core Wasn't Intel first by virtue of using their in-house "HD Graphics" hardware in Silvermont (Bay Trail-M and -T)? Regardless, this is a huge thing in the ARM world, and I hope other vendors will begin to open up documentation.

Good point. Still hard for me to remember that mobile != ARM these days.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#44

Post by zurn »

> 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!

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#45

Post by ebenupton »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #33
davexunit wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#46

Post by Argorak »

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.)

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#47

Post by cbhl »

simcop2387 wrote: post #38
MrZongle2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is another example of how Raspberry Pi Foundation's decision not to move forward with a gazillion different boards, but rather to stick with A and B and let the software evolve, was a good one. I'm very excited to see what the next year brings.

Yea with this happening I think what I would love is a bit more cpu power on the pi. Not even the new 64bit arm cores or anything but an A-15 or A-9 at double the MHz of the existing PI would put it in a huge sweetspot for embedded performance and make it far more usable for a desktop (with ideally more ram too but that's always good).

It sounds like you really want a TI Pandaboard or maybe even one of the Intel SoCs...

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#48

Post by angersock »

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.)

Erm, I'm pretty sure you can use a shareware version (!) of the Q3 assets. Or any of a number of other things.

The idTech2 and idTech3 engines are standbys of the open sores community--it makes sense to use them for testing graphics drivers. You are far more likely to encounter a bug in your driver than in those engines.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#49

Post by georgemcbay »

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.

Re: A birthday present from Broadcom

#50

Post by Argorak »

angersock wrote: post #48
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.)

Erm, I'm pretty sure you can use a shareware version (!) of the Q3 assets. Or any of a number of other things. The idTech2 and idTech3 engines are standbys of the open sores community--it makes sense to use them for testing graphics drivers. You are far more likely to encounter a bug in your driver than in those engines.

Even if free as beer, the demo version is non-free, in an open source sense.

Sure, but you could use any of the many projects built on the open Q3 engine that are actually free as in speech. (And maybe child-friendly)

Also, to be clear: I find it odd, but still a fun endeavor.

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