Able to upgrade not just the speed but manufacturer of CPU?

[Neelix]

Personally I don't have an issue calling it 'piracy', despite what RMS says, as it's usually pretty obvious from context to determine if the act was committed on the high seas with the threat of violence or not - I'm not aware of any instances of copyright infringement committed in the middle of the atlantic yet, but perhaps somebody has torrented something over 3G from a cargo ship.

They'd have to be pretty close to shore to get any kind of 3G signal, hardly what I'd call the high seas.

-Neelix

 

[rygD]

Personally I don't have an issue calling it 'piracy', despite what RMS says, as it's usually pretty obvious from context to determine if the act was committed on the high seas with the threat of violence or not - I'm not aware of any instances of copyright infringement committed in the middle of the atlantic yet, but perhaps somebody has torrented something over 3G from a cargo ship.

So what if you are at sea, getting illegal copies of things, and are willing to use violence to make sure you can do it. Shoving someone is violent, right? Stay away while I copy this CD! (We need a pirate smiley if we ever get more, like the ninja one).

 

[_jr_]

I have issues with people characterising copyright infringement as theft, let alone robbery - theft deprives the original owner of property, copyright infringement doesn't. Theft is a criminal offence, copyright infringement is usually dealt with in the civil courts. But 'copyright infringement' is an awful term, and goes so way to explain why people look for a more convenient term.

Personally I don't have an issue calling it 'piracy', despite what RMS says, as it's usually pretty obvious from context to determine if the act was committed on the high seas with the threat of violence or not - I'm not aware of any instances of copyright infringement committed in the middle of the atlantic yet, but perhaps somebody has torrented something over 3G from a cargo ship.

'Piracy' is acceptable when the alternative is 'robbery', but actually it is infringement and that is the term that should be used IMO.

 

[rygD]

"Infringer" doesn't sound as bad. It also doesn't give the mental imagery they want. It was actually a poor choice to use pirate and piracy, as many kids love pirate stories, and think they are cool. I did. Still do.

 

[levi]

I'm not sure who started calling infringers pirates in the first place. The industry as a whole was calling them thieves by 1983 (when the Federation Against Copyright Theft was set up), but my first introduction to the term 'pirate' was from disc copying utilities a few years later, I suspect, so it might have been coined by the intringers themselves anyway.

 

[Djoga'Ro]

We should push it further coining new terms, until nobody can take it serious anymore. "Raping the copyright owner" or something with mutilation, burning down his/her whole estate? Later doing that to the whole bloodline ultimately after unimaginable amounts of suffering caused ending it (bloodline).

 

[ible]

copyright decapitation with a dull blade.

 

[Klumpen]

copyright decapitation with a salted dull blade.

ftfy

 

[Djoga'Ro]

copyright decapitation with a salted dull blade.

ftfy

You're so mean.

 

[comradekingu]

In the copyright 'genocide' the war-profeteers are the ones who have no intellectual properties.

Usage of language, correct!

Losers, consumers, and creators. Including adaptations.

 

[God Ginrai]

I think this is getting a bit silly now; we're constantly getting sidetracked and we're just repeating ourselves on what we think of Allwinner. Most of what I wrote above probably doesn't add much to the discussion anyway so I think my replies will be reduced to a few lines from now on.

Yea, our posts are starting to get a bit large. I'll try to trim what I respond to in this post.

No, what I said (or at least what I meant) was that Allwinner has issues with GPL and then I proceeded to list other manufacturers producing ARM cores. Again, they are not competitive today but they do have potential.

On that note, an interesting idea would be to use an external GPU over the PCIe bus most of those chips offer, but I'm pretty sure that would ruin the power efficiency. Might be useful for a desktop dock or something.

I see, well as long as we keep open all possibilities, I am happy. We don't necessarily have to move forward with ones that have problems as long as better options appear.

Currently nVidia won't sell to ED but I do agree they would make a good fit. Intel isn't ARM but I guess it would be healthy for the market to have an x86 option.

But nVidia will sell to EvilDragon, provided he meets their condition of working with a trusted company to develop the product. Seeing has how the product in this case would be a "circuit board", it's an option worth considering. As an ARM fan, I'm not very interested in Intel, but it's worth mentioning, because it is still a possibility, and there are those who would like it.

That's not at all what I was trying to say. I find the idea of you hating GPL ridiculous and would defend you on supporting GPL if it ever came up. You don't need to hate GPL to want an Allwinner chip. It is a conflict of interest but we deal with these all the time (such as battery life vs game performance).

Well, that's good to know. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I think you misinterpreted what I said, I meant there's no need for an upgrade board at all until we have the devices in our hands and can accurately judge whether the OMAP5 is sufficient for what we're using it for. The demo board was already capable of running pretty heavy tasks so I wonder what all this extra power in an upgrade board would be useful for.

Yea, I didn't think you were positing that an upgrade was unnecessary. I'm not suggesting that the OMAP5 is insufficient and needs to be replaced, but that we will eventually want to upgrade, and seeing as how development takes a while, the earlier the upgrade is planned, the sooner that upgrade will be available.

-God Ginrai

 

[Neelix]

But nVidia will sell to EvilDragon, provided he meets their condition of working with a trusted company to develop the product. Seeing has how the product in this case would be a "circuit board", it's an option worth considering. As an ARM fan, I'm not very interested in Intel, but it's worth mentioning, because it is still a possibility, and there are those who would like it.

Speaking of that, is there any information available on how nVidia chooses it's trusted companies? I'm still wondering if there would be any practical way of getting Golden Delicious added to that list.

-Neelix

 

[Grench]

Speaking of that, is there any information available on how nVidia chooses it's trusted companies? I'm still wondering if there would be any practical way of getting Golden Delicious added to that list.

-Neelix

'trusted companies' directly implies 'closed'. All things being equal, if given the choice, I'd lean towards 'more open'.

If competitive for speed & efficiency, SoC producing companies that sell their parts on the open market with existing open drivers published into the Linux kernel earn a +1 or more to the product evaluation.

If using the OMAP 5 as a baseline for that, Nvidia's SoC's would be a step or three worse on the open scale. Intel, absurd as it may sound, would be +3 or so.

I suspect that Intel may have killed the mobile Atom chips because they recognized that these mobile Atoms failed in what they were trying to do - and succeeding where they did not want them to.

Mobile Atoms failed to take the phone & tablet world away from ARM.
Mobile Atoms started to succeed in taking small market share from the notebook CPU and some desktop CPU arenas.

The first one is obvious. The second one may need some expansion. Microsoft Surface 3 (X7-Z8700) isn't much of a tablet, but it's a pretty sound solution for a salesperson oriented travel laptop. Gumstick Bay Trail and Cherry thumbsticks and micro format PCs hit the other end a bit.

So, with no hope of gaining significant share in the market they were pursuing and the real threat of cannibalizing from other higher margin products - the math adds up to killing it.

 

[Yoyobuae]

But nVidia will sell to EvilDragon, provided he meets their condition of working with a trusted company to develop the product. Seeing has how the product in this case would be a "circuit board", it's an option worth considering. As an ARM fan, I'm not very interested in Intel, but it's worth mentioning, because it is still a possibility, and there are those who would like it.

Suppose some trusted company does develop a Pyra CPU board based on nVidia chip and sells it to ED. What about the software?

I mean besides the hardware, Golden Delicious is also making a working kernel, including support for Pyra specific things like the rotator chip. Would it be possible to build that same kernel but for nVidia chip without much modifications? I suppose that some hardware specific parts (device tree, I think it's called) would need to be modified. Also how's support for GPU driver on Linux?

Would it be required that the trusted company from nVidia do any software/kernel things? Would they agree to do it for normal Linux kernel and not restrict it to Android flavor Linux kernels only?

I guess that's the big issue with outsourcing some of the design to another company. That company would gain significant leverage in the design decisions.

 

[God Ginrai]

Speaking of that, is there any information available on how nVidia chooses it's trusted companies? I'm still wondering if there would be any practical way of getting Golden Delicious added to that list.

-Neelix

Getting them added to the list would be awesome, but I'm sure the selection process involves either paying money to nvidia to "join the club" or a sizable portfolio of designed products.

Suppose some trusted company does develop a Pyra CPU board based on nVidia chip and sells it to ED. What about the software?

I mean besides the hardware, Golden Delicious is also making a working kernel, including support for Pyra specific things like the rotator chip. Would it be possible to build that same kernel but for nVidia chip without much modifications? I suppose that some hardware specific parts (device tree, I think it's called) would need to be modified. Also how's support for GPU driver on Linux?

Would it be required that the trusted company from nVidia do any software/kernel things? Would they agree to do it for normal Linux kernel and not restrict it to Android flavor Linux kernels only?

I guess that's the big issue with outsourcing some of the design to another company. That company would gain significant leverage in the design decisions.

nVidia releases the source for their kernels, etc. And supposedly (although I can only find a little bit of info on this) they are trying to make the Tegra gpu drivers FOSS. So just about anyone should be able to work on the kernel and necessary software, although I wouldn't be surprised if these "trusted companies" also offer to help with the kernel and such if an extra fee is paid. As for "support for the GPU driver on Linux", do you mean as opposed to Android? Given that nvidia is sharing rootfs scripts for the Tegra to run ALARM, I would assume that the support for non-Android Linux is there, but since I haven't looked much into it, I wouldn't be able to tell you how good the support is.

-God Ginrai

 

[Neelix]

'trusted companies' directly implies 'closed'. All things being equal, if given the choice, I'd lean towards 'more open'.

Perhaps, but not necessarily. That depends what their requirements are for becoming trusted, and the nature of the guidelines trusted companies have to follow. Without knowing that there's not enough information to know if those guidelines and requirements are mutually exclusive with being open.

-Neelix

 

[Djhg2000]

Yes, the Tegra series are supposed to have mainlined support in the nouveau driver stack, here's a nice article for providing an overview: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-TX1-Nouveau-Comment

 

[Grench]

Waaaay back when @EvilDragon would have communicated wiwth Nvidia, the Shield was still a big new thing in their pipeline. They have expanded that product offering to a TV module, a tablet + controller and a very fat dedicated Android clamshell gaming handheld.

I suspect that Nvidia might still see something like the Pyra as a potential competitor. If that was their reason for not wanting to sell chips... It wouldn't hurt to ask them, but I wouldn't hold my breath on it.

 

[fusion_power]

Befor the small Pyra is an competitor to NVidia, all these Chinese Mobile Devices may come first in the competitor line to the big players. Even compared "unknown" devices like the GPD stuff have much bigger batches than the Pyra will ever have. So NVidia could support the Pyra without have to fear a potential competitor.

 

[rygD]

We just need to convince them of that.