Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 6th Nov 2012 23:35 UTC
The desktop and laptop world is dominated by x86, the mobile/embedded world by ARM. Conventional wisdom, right? Not really. There's also MIPS - hundreds of millions of embedded devices run on MIPS, and for years now, the architecture has been trying to break into the mobile world dominated so much by ARM. They just a got a boost: MIPS has been acquired by Imagination Tech, most known for its PowerVR graphics chips used in a lot of smartphones and tablets.
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Member since:2010-06-08
Member since:2010-03-08
Aha, great. Grab the MIPS datasheets while you can...
+1, PowerVR is probably one of the few brands in the semiconductor industry that makes things harder than Qualcomm for OS developers.
Consider the Raspberry Pi story: the team was persistent enough to get a TRM from Qualcomm, of all things, and yet Linux on the RPi still relies on binary blobs for GPU operation...
Edited 2012-11-07 06:45 UTC
Member since:2005-07-08
This is something work life has taught me about companies and communities.
It doesn't matter if certain software is made open source or if a given company is geek friendly.
This will only exist as long as the main developers or main company is able to stay in business.
If business fails, patent actions happen, or the company gets bought, then it is the end. Period, nothing to do about it.
So in the end we can only enjoy technology, regardless of the owning company, but with a critical consumer voice.
Member since:2010-03-08
Big errata: If we are talking PowerVR, Ti SoCs (which traditionally come with extensive documentation of anything but the GPU) would be a better example. Turns out RPi uses a Qualcomm GPU, so that's just Qualcomm being dicks again by purposely giving out incomplete manuals.
Edited 2012-11-07 08:05 UTC
Member since:2009-05-19
Member since:2005-07-06
Consider the Raspberry Pi story: the team was persistent enough to get a TRM from Qualcomm, of all things, and yet Linux on the RPi still relies on binary blobs for GPU operation...
NVM the Qualcomm/Broadcom mixup - it seems that the design bureau of the Broadcom SoC used in RPi is a stone's throw away from Raspberry Pi HQ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphamosaic
Also, IIRC, one of the ~historical ~heads of RPi works at Broadcom now.
Both were probably important factors in SoC choice (not so much "going Broadcom despite the troubles", more "keeping it close to home")
PS. This news, of Imagination Tech acquiring MIPS, is probably also about "family business" - this time, a bit of a turmoil in the family. After all ARM Ltd. bought, not a long time ago, some Norwegian GFX fellows - That's where ARM Ltd. got Mali GFX cores.
Meanwhile, Imagination Tech was and still is a major provider of GFX cores in ARM ecosystem. So it's ARM Ltd. who kinda threw the gauntlet here?
Edited 2012-11-08 03:01 UTC
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
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Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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2008-07-01
Aha, great. Grab the MIPS datasheets while you can...