VIA Keeps Trying For Kernel Inclusion Of Its DRM

[marek]

1) They will not make an open source 3D driver probably because they won't be able to implement their patented technologies in it.
2) They are damaging the open source graphics ecosystem by not allowing us to use their patents that everybody else already has.

My two cents.

[Adarion]

and well VIA has a "great" reputation among linux community so I'm sure VIA users are almost extinct here anyway.

Hey. Wait. I got even 2 VIA boxes. (And some chips here and there) A laptop with a C3-2 and a mini-ITX C7 based. Esp. latter is very good for an x86 in power consumption and the laptop runs 97% with free drivers (I think there might be a binary blob in the softmodem driver part somewhere).
The HW is cheap and isn't good for numbercrunching but that's not what I do with these boxes. Just the GPU/video issues (I'm grateful to the openchrome people but still it sucks) and a few bugs sometimes are nasty.
I'd rather like to see Harald Welte finally kick them to release some specs, cause from all I know the code they "sometimes" release is not of good quality *cough*.

[val-gaav]

Here is the graph from 2008 phoronix survey


I'm sorry but "almost extinct" seems to be good word for this situation... Not that I expect Windows graphs to be much better then this one.

[Adarion]

Here is the graph

Of course. Compared to AMD-ATI, nv and intel it's not much but still the largest among the small. I admit that I have quite a high concentration of VIA's among my AMDs (and intel CPU, nv GPU) but that's due to the fact that once I needed a notebook and it was the cheapest in the world (Elitegroup ECS G320) and that I was very interested in low power systems at all times - and since Transmeta is no more - I got hooked up to some VIA CPUs for I am still mainly working in the x86 area.
Hoping to receive my fist ARM (besides the router) soon.


Of course the mass market will have a high share of the 3 main GPU manufracturers but then a survery with about 10'000 people still doesn't tell you everything. It really depends on whom you reach. IT sites will barely receive traffic from people with an IE user agent but then websites about cooking or whatever might see a lot of IE users, too.
And there are still a lot of Linux/BSD users not being aware or not actively following Phoronix.
Still the trend is that not much people will have a VIA GPU for the reason that VIA does not sell these as dedicated cards. (And even if they did not much people would buy it I guess.)

[Duhorigh73]

If youre trying to do photo editing, dont go with VIA. Not enough horsepower, for that matter as someone already said it may not have enough power for HD playback even.

[misiu_mp]

If youre trying to do photo editing, dont go with VIA. Not enough horsepower, for that matter as someone already said it may not have enough power for HD playback even.

What graphics card can accelerate photo editing and in what way? I dont think that is possible unless you do a GP-GPU thingy (image processing is a rather ordinary computing task).

[Svartalf]

What graphics card can accelerate photo editing and in what way? I dont think that is possible unless you do a GP-GPU thingy (image processing is a rather ordinary computing task).

Yeah, but until the Nano, they had sub-par FPU performance and the CPU compared favorably to a comparably clocked PIII. It wasn't P-IV class, even with the C7. The main compelling thing with VIA's prior to Nano CPUs was that they way outperformed any of the other low-power X86 solutions (In performance per watt- and in some cases TDP even...)- and they were "good enough" for many applications. I've had several in the past and they were nice- but I got tired of the red-headed stepchild treatment we kept seeming to get from them. They kept acting like they liked Linux and then would change their minds. So, I quit using my EPIA machines as while they were great on power consumption, they just didn't have what it took overall for performance.

[Adarion]

Well, maybe Inkscape could make use of OpenVG and I guess you need some 2d acc. for scrolling, since you will see a difference in VESA driver plus e.g. browser scrolling and a "real" driver plus brwoser scrolling.
Not sure about GIMP being able to make use of any GPU stuff for image editing though.

Well, since I still have my Laptop with a C3-2 + CLE266 GPU and a small tower with C7 Eden and CN700 GPU I still use that stuff but working with my AMDs is far more fun cause it just works better. And in terms of power consumption / raw-computing-power-to-consumption-ratio VIA is in high danger being overrun by intel/amd.

[misiu_mp]

Now you start talking about their cpu's. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with them. They are low performance and so are comparable solutions from the competitors (good luck doing image editing on an atom). Low power CPU's are not meant to do this kind of jobs. It could be arguable whether their performance/watt ratio on the cpu is still so competitive, but this thread was about their GPU's, so lets not get into that.
BTW Svartalf, clock-by-clock PIII was much better than PIV (Netburst was designed to be high clock and low performance per clock; it was a marketing move, remember?).

[Kano]

Did anybody notice that a combination of VIA Nano and NV Ion (2) is the only way for NV to stay in the x86 netbook business for 2010? As NV has got only a licence for fsb powered systems that would be the logical way to go around this issue as Atom N450+ will not run with old Ion. When you think of VIA, then they would certainly perfer to sell plattform solutions with own chipsets. But then they should be really good and provide all features you want to have by a current system. Even when the drm bits are in the kernel, who says that the rest is ready for prime time. Before Nano the cpu speed was so EXTREMELY slow that even starting firefox took ages. I don't own such a device, but what i saw via vnc was really enough.