BeagleBone Black - WAS: Time for Pi

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Giles Orr <gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| P.S. Android support is reportedly unaccelerated and essentially
| unusable.  Broadcom apparently has a working solution but hasn't
| released it into the wild.  (I can't find the article that said that
| at the moment so it should be taken with a grain of salt ... but the
| Android-on-Beagle pages all talk about their "goals" rather than
| capabilities.)

What's this got to do with Broadcom?

The BBB has a TI SoC and that includes a PowerVR GPU, (SGX530).  Like
all GPUs for ARM, this one is evil, but not due to Broadcom.

I don't expect improvements since

(1) TI is getting out of this business

(2) the PowerVR "Intellectual Property" is owned by Imagination
    Technologies.  Even under great pressure, they've not opened
    the specs.

(3) Apple appears to have licensed the PowerVR stuff in a way that
    future upgrades will probably be reserved to Apple (no friend
    of openness)n

There is a reverse engineering effort.
<http://powervr.gnu.org.ve/doku.php>
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