“Adobe’s Open Screen Project, which puts Flash acceleration support on a variety of platforms, has killed Intel’s ‘full Internet’ rationale for mobile x86. But the same project has also brought HD YouTube and Hulu to Intel’s Pine Trail platform, which hurts the case for NVIDIA’s Ion.”
.. and make vendor lock-in harder .. I feel so sorry for Intel and Nvidia (and Adobe).
Heh, was about to say something similar but your sarcasm pretty much says it all. Plus, I’m not so thrilled about the fact that they only talk about Flash and WMP acceleration in Windows. I really hope a mainstream ARM-based netbook will put a dent to all this Windows-centric hardware development. If it hastens the death of Flash, so much the better. Even if I did want to use Windows though, I still wouldn’t use media player and yet this chip only accelerates media player and Flash if you go by this article. Anyone know if this is true? Shouldn’t it work so long as any application is playing a supported video instead of concentrating on specific applications like this?
Decoding acceleration in Windows Media Player is achieved via its support for DirectShow and Windows Media Foundation codecs which may take advantage of DirectX Video Acceleration (the device driver interface used by the hardware to offload encode/decode).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965263(VS.85).aspx
Any application that takes advantage of those platform services will also have accelerated decoding.
You are right, don’t forget also Broadcom. Blobs kill the mergence of new OSes and foster windows only (and possibly Mac). So
either give the specs to consumer…
or … don’t use them (personally I will stick to Intel/AMD open source efforts, hope to see VIA join in). I love Linux,Solaris,BSD and Haiku and I am afraid efforts like the above are clearly anti-competitive.
Edited 2009-12-27 11:02 UTC
Replying to my above post even commercial variants like AmigaOs. ecommstation, QNX can have a hard time with the proprietary interfaces. HW APIs must be standardized and so Flash or whatever can use only SW interfaces. You just change the underlying platform (and thus you can see with the generic standard-based HW driver whether the new device is better or not)
So Intel has been trying to make inroads with graphics over the past few years (even if Larabee is AWOL), AMD bought ATI largely out of fear of Intel’s dominance if Larabee came to pass, and Nvidia has been slowly moving into the processor space with Tegra.
I wonder if Nvidia have considered buying VIA’s processor business and make inroads into x86/x64 to complete this equation? Nvidia could add a lot of value to VIA’s processor line, and VIA have x86/x64 cross-licensing agreements in place that I’m sure would be attractive to Nvidia, as well as reducing their reliance on Intel.
Edited 2009-12-27 00:40 UTC
IIRC, VIA would have the buy nVidia, else the x86 license would disappear.
You already answered yourself why NVidia won’t buy VIA. The key word is “cross-licensing”. NVidia would probably lose more in such a deal than Intel. While NVidia would be able to manufacture x86 CPUs, Intel would get instant access to NVidia’s GPU-related technologies. That would be Intel’s wet dreams come true.
I think it’s not a bad decision by NVidia to license the ARM architecture. Sure, NVidia has to pay license fees, but other than that, there are no strings attached.
The smartphone market is huge. There’s even the possibility that NVidia could power the successors of the Nintendo DS or Sony’s PSP.
Or netbooks, of course. I’d sure love to see a netbook that could actually live up to the promise of what such a small machine could really deliver. X86, to my mind, doesn’t deliver on the real promise and won’t until they can make an x86 chip that is as energy efficient as ARM. A portable computer with several days of battery life, fanless, running any ARM-compatible os of choice. That’d be perfect.
Well, that depends of the manufacturers’ will to ship netbooks that can’t run Windows.
Look at Nokia: Despite their involvement with KDE, they opted to ship Windows 7 on the Booklet 3G. That’s playing save.
My personal opinion is that ARM CPUs have a better chance on N900-like “pocket computers”.
If that’s what cross licensing really implies, then why hasn’t AMD had to share its ATI derived graphics technology with Intel?
I’m seeing a case of Intel’s DMI interconnect design being bad for nVidia, not anything about Flash (building anti-competition into the bus, rather than just using HT–brilliant!). Not to mention, Intel went for piss-poor video offloading support…again.
ION has way more going for it than Flash. It’s x86 that’s the double-edged sword: they need to work in x86+Windows for the market, but AMD has their own IGP, and Intel (emperor of x86) hates them.
Edited 2009-12-27 00:43 UTC