Hi,
On 02/05/2014 03:04 PM, Michael Mrozek wrote:
notaz, does it have all the stuff we need for software? (Linux drivers should be available, but does it have Neon and 2D acceleration we can use?)
NEON: All newer SoCs from 2013 or later have NEON, so no worries there. However it was measured that NEON on older Snapdragon is weaker than on competition, CortexA8 even: http://www.openssl.org/~appro/Snapdragon-S4.html ..and there are rumors that it's still a problem on newer snapdragons too (maybe it's how they save power?): http://forums.ppsspp.org/showthread.php?tid=7069&pid=58581#pid58581 no idea how that all compares with CortexA15..
2D acceleration: doesn't seem to be available. Android only needs a regular 3D GPU, so they probably didn't bother adding 2D one. OMAP5's 2D has potential to be used for Xorg, but its unclear if it would ever work out..
GPU: There might be problem getting Linux GPU driver as qualcomm don't seem to be Linux focused, you need to find out if it's even available. It's possible to run Android's driver with wrapper libs, but that would be a bit of a mess.. The open driver looks very promising, but like Nikolaus said it's WIP.. GLES3 that some forum posters want so much will need binary blobs, at least for now.
DSP: Snapdragon has custom DSP called "Hexagon", but documentation is under NDA. In contrast OMAP's C64x is fully documented (and always was), but still nothing is using it on pandora, even after bsp wrote his framework.. Snapdragon's Hexagon still has free compilers and documentation for older versions of the chip.
Mainline: Qualcomm doesn't seem to care about mainline, there is little support so vendor kernel will have to be used. However because the chips are so popular, there is a bit community activity and even sonymobile sent a driver, but it's nothing overall compared to OMAPs mainline activity .
Just to make sure: We don't know yet if we can get it - but the question is: IF we can get it, would it make sense to switch?
As usual it's not easy to answer, there are various advantages and disadvantages..
Grazvydas