SoC: Back and forth!


Hm. I seem to get a flashback to some sort of handheld console that was going to use a particular SoC, but changed quite late in the process because the new one will be so much better. Wonder what that was? :)
 
Let's hope the Pyra will hype a lot and it's worth for Qualcom to support it.
 
Imagine another name would have been selected.

DragonBox Pandragon with SnapDragon    óÒ
 
nice, will be cool if the snapdragon makes it in, but will not be a letdown for me if it doesnt.

What about the screen size? will it be widescreen like the pandora, or will it be something like 16:10?
 
Not getting my hopes up.

Foxgod said:
nice, will be cool if the snapdragon makes it in, but will not be a letdown for me if it doesnt.

What about the screen size? will it be widescreen like the pandora, or will it be something like 16:10?
Click to expand...
That should really be ask somewhere else, but I think 16:10 would be neat.
 
Last time I tried looking for Linux drivers from Qualcomm I found quite a mess, their "Linux SDK" shipped in an .exe Installer that was absolutely impossible to run or extract without a Windows system, and as it turned out the "driver" was simply a means to use the driver of an already running Android system... It's been quite some time, though, the Adreno 205 I was trying to mess with was still somewhat recent at that time.
 
So which qualcomm would be possible ?

What would we gain/loss vs the TI ?
 
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Somehow I doubt, that this guy can manage to persuade his company to sell us a small batch of Qualcomms, if they already said that they wouldn't.

Maybe when the demand gets a bit bigger at Pandora3 or they suddenly change their opinion now against all ods, who knows?
 
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Big difference between couldn't find a contact, and no. The gate is still open. 
 
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Qualcomm has it's own share of problems though (compared to OMAP), like:

  • weaker NEON: http://www.openssl.org/~appro/Snapdragon-S4.html  (it's unclear if newer chips are still affected, but rumors say they still are).
  • vendor not caring about mainline kernels at all (only community support), meaning kernel updates will be hard
  • no vendor Linux support in general, TI at least provides something
  • no public chip documentation (NDA only), lacking documentation on Hexagon DSP (only usable from Android SDK?)
  • no 2D acceleration
Sure freedreno is great, but it's all in Rob's hands, and there are limits on things single person can do. For example, GLES3 that some people want so much is only available on vendor's driver (at least for now), which is most likely Android-only.
 
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Oh that sounds bad for emulators !

And as expected, the dsp is different.

I read somewhere that the snapdragon isn't really a cortex.
 
So, it seems Qualcomm doesn't really care much about Linux, only the community around it, whereas TI cares about Linux...

And missing 2D acceleration is something else, the Pandora uses it a lot, so it would be a shame missing it (moving windows around on the OMAP5-devboard is stuttery right now as we're not using any hardware acceleration yet...).

Not sure Qualcomm is the way to go, but let's find out about their Linux and NEON support for the current SoCs (and whether they would sell it to us after all).

I'd really like to use a company that supports Linux though.
 
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