what do you guys think about the marvell armada pxa 2128


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monstercameron

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Its been there for a while yet the only devices I see using it are the olpc 4 and a panasonic rugged tablet...it does seem peculiar with its trio of custom arm cores with the third core for low power usage (a la nvida 5+1 but "who done it"...first IDK) and the obscure vivante gpu(although the rockchips with them sold many units)(gc 2000 or gc4000?). As for the impressive bits, marvel boasts 466 Mtris/sec (among other metrics I do not comprehend)which seems to best the sgx 554 mp4 (ipad 4) and ps3 gpu (~250 Mtris/sec) on that front and come really close to the xbox 360s 500Mtris, although exophase will tell me that triangle count isnt everything and who cooks their numbers.


pdf here.
 
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Ingenic and Freescale also both sell Vivante GPUs. They're not that obscure. This SoC is the first real asymmetric multicore ARM I've heard of. It was announced long before nVidia revealed their companion core in Tegra 3 but I wouldn't consider that asymmetric multicore because it can't run at the same time. Something more similar is ARM's big.LITTLE, although that takes it a step further by using different CPU uarchs.


Marvell sells a ton of SoCs in higher end embedded stuff like routers but they've really fallen off the map with mainstream media devices. Bottom line, if it was any good it'd be getting used outside of special niches where they probably struck special deals.


And sorry, but your prediction of what I would say is a little off - here's what I would actually say: triangle count is completely unambiguous so we have no idea what vendors are actually talking about when they use it. It could be limited by vertex shading, triangle setup, rasterization, clipping, or maybe just how many commands the thing can receive in a second. We don't know anything about how big the triangles are (could all be getting clipped to zero pixels), how many varyings they have, how complex their transformations are (if more than just an identity transform), or if they're even getting drawn on the screen.


They say "four shaders", sounds like GC2000 to me.. and the fillrate number is close to Vivante's 1.25G/s but Vivante says 100MTri/s, so I don't really have to tell you anything about what I think of their numbers now do I.
 
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... okay I don't know if this is just me or what but somehow I find it seriously jarring when you do that fake quote thing. If I'm the only person who posted please just reply without quoting, we know who you're talking to. Or if you want to address me could you do it with something like prefixing "Exophase:" before you say something instead of ripping the quote out? Or just include the quote normally.


I know almost nothing real about Vivante's GPUs beyond what they publish which is incredibly vague. And that i.MX6 does pretty well in GLMark but Vivante hasn't announced any kind of successor IP so they could start getting left far behind pretty soon.
 
Oh dear god, I didn't even realize that's what that button did. Now I feel like a jerk for complaining about it ;p Although I think that they just did it to make it easier to construct custom quotes/copy paste stuff into and not with the intention of getting people to use it as a response by itself. Or at least I hope so.
 
Yeah, the quick quote function is useful to reduce huge quotes where you only reply to one sentence to that one.


You simply select the text you want to quote and press the Quick Quote button, which will get rid of all the remaining useless text :)


If you don't mark any text, nothing will be quoted ;)
 
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