Star ARM's Feeling Lucky; Netbook 'Battle' Just Beginning?
Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Mon 20th Apr 2009 08:46 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems Thus far it seems that netbooks with Windows XP and Intel Atom processors have been the most successful, leaving little room for other players. There have been those who doubt ARM's longevity in this particular market, so we decided to interview some of the folks at ARM. They told OSNews that the company is confident about its current and future mobile markets, and Linux, which will soon be on various ARM-powered netbooks, is one of the reasons why.
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lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

???

ARM CPUs are SOCs with their own graphic cores (mostly PowerVR AFAIK).. open source AMD and VIA (which still totally suck) drivers won't help one bit.


Great! That is even easier then. ARM obviously already know all of the programming registers for their own graphics cores.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_3D_(OpenGL)
http://www.mesa3d.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D
http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.Org_Server

Just port that lot (actually, ARM probably already have).

PS: Yes, indeed, it looks like ARM already have done precisely that:
http://www.symbian-freak.com/news/006/05/powervr_mbx.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR

For other 3D graphics chips such a port (once the 3D programming registers are known) has taken only a few months.

However, even having discovered about ARM and PowerVR, one still cannot discount an ARM/ATI combination:

http://www.symbian-freak.com/news/006/05/ati_ft_nokia.htm

Edited 2009-04-20 11:16 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

kragil Member since:
2006-01-04

A few months???

The AMD specs have been out for years now and the driver is still very rudimentary.(Let's not talk about VIA.)

Just linking to random stuff does not prove your point.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

lemur2 Member since:
2007-02-17

A few months??? The AMD specs have been out for years now and the driver is still very rudimentary.


Did you even read the links I gave?

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r700_oss_3d&...

The second sentence in that article links here:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzAxNg

"AMD Releases R600/700 3D Documentation
Posted by Michael Larabel on January 26, 2009"


Your guess that "the AMD specs have been out for years now" is off by "years now". Try "Months now".

Here is an extra clue from the links I gave:
"This code will allow open-source 3D acceleration on the Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series of graphics cards. Those using the Radeon X1000 series (R500) or earlier have already had open-source ATI 3D support for a while."


The status of the corresponding open source 3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000, from the links I gave:

"Over the coming weeks and months this R600/700 3D support should mature to be able to run games that are compatible with the Mesa stack."


This was the status as at ...
"AMD Pushes Out New R600/700 3D Code
Published on April 18, 2009
Written by Michael Larabel"


April 18th, 2009.

From Jan 26 to April 18 work on the rudimentary support for 3D has been commenced, using the specs alone. A complete re-write was required from the existing R500 driver. Following the code relase on April 18, work is now expected to go much faster, and there are hopes for a working driver to be released within a month or so.

Just linking to random stuff doesn't prove your point


Failing to read and understand linked stuff (which BTW was entirely relevant) doesn't prove yours.

Edited 2009-04-21 03:51 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2