Wow, FOSDEM really was impressive this time.
There were so many people interested in the Pandora and Pyra, it's amazing.
And even though the time for my talk was a bit too short, I think I made myself mostly clear about what I want.
Well, and if not, then you can always ask here at the boards - and the blog entries will probably clear up some more mysteries as well
Productive discussions about the OS have started on the boards as well and I will take care about new forum sections for that tomorrow.
Thanks a lot to anyone who wants to help out here
One question I've seen quite a few times was "Why use the OMAP5? It has a PowerVR chip, which doesn't have OpenSource drivers!"
As mentioned, you should take part of the Pyra development and production process - and of course, also of the things that already happened in the past.
Especially, since that basically answers the above question as well - so follow me on a journey...
From OMAP5 to everything else and back
Back in 2011/2012, when the OMAP5 had just been announced, we decided to use it for the successor. It was, once again, faster than anything else.
But it seemed like TI would never even release the OMAP5...
Early 2013, TI still couldn't give any clear dates - and now Samsung, NVidia, MediaTek, etc. were all catching up.
It was clear for me that I WILL work on a successor - and it was pretty clear that the most complicated things to source would be the SoC and the LCD.
So I started as early as I could and contacted various other companies.
Samsung was the first company I contacted, since the German Headquarters are in Munich, just 45 minutes away from me.
The german team did pay me a visit and they really liked the Pandora and the idea to use a Samsung SoC for the successor.
They did their best to convice the Korean HQ, but without success. Samsung did not want to sell us their SoC.
So I continued to search for companies.
I contacted the Freescale distriubtor, as their Cortex-A9 SoCs can be bought without any registration and in small quantities - but unfortunately, they decided to not produce a Cortex A15.
Next stop: MediaTek. Asian company, so probably easier to get than from the huge global players.
However, MediaTek only offer Android drivers, and they do not plan to support Linux - well, not for our small quantities anyways.
So they decided to not sell them to us as well.
I knew from some developers that Rokchips English design manuals were never really usable - so even if we could get the chip, we couldn't make the hardware design without a good manual.
I tried to call nvidia a few times, but the German Headquarters never really picked up the phone.
Thanks to some contacts I had, I finally got the right persons from nvidia worldwide headquarters on the phone - however, only to get another "no".
They explained to me that in order to be able to use the Tegra, I need to let the hardware be designed and produced by a contracted partner company from them.
That's certainly not what we want - and my guess is that no company would do such a complex design as we need for such a low quantity anyways.
Things didn't look good here. There were still a few more companies who licensed ARMs big.LITTLE architecture, so I contacted them one after another.
Most of them were in industrial / automotive business, and they planned to have their SoC ready in 2016... a bit too late for us.
Then TIs distributor contacted us - apparently, the OMAP5 was finished and will go into mass production in November 2013.
We can still get it if we want.
Well, we talked about the various options.
PowerVR doesn't have the sourcecode released - but then again, all other GPU drivers in SoCs are closed source as well.
I know a few will now shout "But for MALI there's an OpenSource driver available!" - well, yes and no.
Yes, there's a driver available - but it's for the old MALI GPU. Not a single Cortex-A15 SoC uses the old one.
And it's unknown when and whether there will be an OpenSource driver for the new Mali as well.
TI offers Linux drivers. for their SoC and for the PowerVR.
One thing that's good about the PowerVR is that the kernel part of the driver is not closed source - which means:
While you need a binary blob for the 3D driver, it can still be used on any compiled kernel or OS.
So when PowerVR stops development for the SGX driver, it doesn't mean we cannot update the kernel or OS.
We can. Only the 3D driver will not be updated anymore.
While a fully OpenSource driver would be nice, there just isn't one out there on an ARM SoC.
We can't fix bugs in the 3D driver, but we won't be stuck with an outdated kernel ever either.
You can see that on the current Pandora:
There's a small application available which lets you change the 3D driver version on-the-fly in the running OS.
Each version has different bugs, advantages and disadvantages - but they can be run, regardless of the kernel version.
We had a long journey, and I talked to various SoC manufacturers - and TI turned out to be the only feasable for us.
I'm pretty sure even though it has its flaws, it will be a neat chip for our next handheld.
The horsepower I've seen so far is impressive!
Oh, and about "Why not using an Intel?"
Well... to be honest: I rather be safe and sure than risky and sorry.
When we decided what SoC to use, no one knew if the mobile market will ever switch over to Intel.
There are many Android games out there that probably wouldn't work anymore - and we would also lose all the optimized ARM emulators out there like PPSSPP or PCSXReARMed.
Yeah, I know, it exists for x86 as well - but it's probably not as optimized and therefore drains more battery...
It was too risky for a small company like ourselves - so it's best to stick to ARM right now.
Well, that's it for todays post.
I'll probably post more stuff next weekend.
See you at the boards
There were so many people interested in the Pandora and Pyra, it's amazing.
And even though the time for my talk was a bit too short, I think I made myself mostly clear about what I want.
Well, and if not, then you can always ask here at the boards - and the blog entries will probably clear up some more mysteries as well
Productive discussions about the OS have started on the boards as well and I will take care about new forum sections for that tomorrow.
Thanks a lot to anyone who wants to help out here
One question I've seen quite a few times was "Why use the OMAP5? It has a PowerVR chip, which doesn't have OpenSource drivers!"
As mentioned, you should take part of the Pyra development and production process - and of course, also of the things that already happened in the past.
Especially, since that basically answers the above question as well - so follow me on a journey...
From OMAP5 to everything else and back
Back in 2011/2012, when the OMAP5 had just been announced, we decided to use it for the successor. It was, once again, faster than anything else.
But it seemed like TI would never even release the OMAP5...
Early 2013, TI still couldn't give any clear dates - and now Samsung, NVidia, MediaTek, etc. were all catching up.
It was clear for me that I WILL work on a successor - and it was pretty clear that the most complicated things to source would be the SoC and the LCD.
So I started as early as I could and contacted various other companies.
Samsung was the first company I contacted, since the German Headquarters are in Munich, just 45 minutes away from me.
The german team did pay me a visit and they really liked the Pandora and the idea to use a Samsung SoC for the successor.
They did their best to convice the Korean HQ, but without success. Samsung did not want to sell us their SoC.
So I continued to search for companies.
I contacted the Freescale distriubtor, as their Cortex-A9 SoCs can be bought without any registration and in small quantities - but unfortunately, they decided to not produce a Cortex A15.
Next stop: MediaTek. Asian company, so probably easier to get than from the huge global players.
However, MediaTek only offer Android drivers, and they do not plan to support Linux - well, not for our small quantities anyways.
So they decided to not sell them to us as well.
I knew from some developers that Rokchips English design manuals were never really usable - so even if we could get the chip, we couldn't make the hardware design without a good manual.
I tried to call nvidia a few times, but the German Headquarters never really picked up the phone.
Thanks to some contacts I had, I finally got the right persons from nvidia worldwide headquarters on the phone - however, only to get another "no".
They explained to me that in order to be able to use the Tegra, I need to let the hardware be designed and produced by a contracted partner company from them.
That's certainly not what we want - and my guess is that no company would do such a complex design as we need for such a low quantity anyways.
Things didn't look good here. There were still a few more companies who licensed ARMs big.LITTLE architecture, so I contacted them one after another.
Most of them were in industrial / automotive business, and they planned to have their SoC ready in 2016... a bit too late for us.
Then TIs distributor contacted us - apparently, the OMAP5 was finished and will go into mass production in November 2013.
We can still get it if we want.
Well, we talked about the various options.
PowerVR doesn't have the sourcecode released - but then again, all other GPU drivers in SoCs are closed source as well.
I know a few will now shout "But for MALI there's an OpenSource driver available!" - well, yes and no.
Yes, there's a driver available - but it's for the old MALI GPU. Not a single Cortex-A15 SoC uses the old one.
And it's unknown when and whether there will be an OpenSource driver for the new Mali as well.
TI offers Linux drivers. for their SoC and for the PowerVR.
One thing that's good about the PowerVR is that the kernel part of the driver is not closed source - which means:
While you need a binary blob for the 3D driver, it can still be used on any compiled kernel or OS.
So when PowerVR stops development for the SGX driver, it doesn't mean we cannot update the kernel or OS.
We can. Only the 3D driver will not be updated anymore.
While a fully OpenSource driver would be nice, there just isn't one out there on an ARM SoC.
We can't fix bugs in the 3D driver, but we won't be stuck with an outdated kernel ever either.
You can see that on the current Pandora:
There's a small application available which lets you change the 3D driver version on-the-fly in the running OS.
Each version has different bugs, advantages and disadvantages - but they can be run, regardless of the kernel version.
We had a long journey, and I talked to various SoC manufacturers - and TI turned out to be the only feasable for us.
I'm pretty sure even though it has its flaws, it will be a neat chip for our next handheld.
The horsepower I've seen so far is impressive!
Oh, and about "Why not using an Intel?"
Well... to be honest: I rather be safe and sure than risky and sorry.
When we decided what SoC to use, no one knew if the mobile market will ever switch over to Intel.
There are many Android games out there that probably wouldn't work anymore - and we would also lose all the optimized ARM emulators out there like PPSSPP or PCSXReARMed.
Yeah, I know, it exists for x86 as well - but it's probably not as optimized and therefore drains more battery...
It was too risky for a small company like ourselves - so it's best to stick to ARM right now.
Well, that's it for todays post.
I'll probably post more stuff next weekend.
See you at the boards
