BeagleBone Black - WAS: Time for Pi

Tue May 21 17:59:55 UTC 2013

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 01:25:21PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> 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.

At least a lot of the arm GPUs are getting reverse engineered.
The PowerVR currently does appear to be the least likely to end up with
a working driver, but that could change I suppose.

> I don't expect improvements since
> 
> (1) TI is getting out of this business

They certainly are not getting out of the arm soc business.  Which
business do you think they are getting out of?

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

That is certainly true and highly annoying.

> (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)

No idea.  And Apple probably isn't telling.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists