ARM: This Open-Source Stack Will Only Grow Louder

[DeepDayze]

A bit off topic, but still similar to op....

Yeah I have gentoo installed and booted on my evo4g right now and the one big thing missing is graphics. If this chip does get decent drivers I'll be damn sure that my next phone has it.

Next phone should be one that's Linux friendly. I would love my beloved Debian on a phone and maybe dual boot it with Android

[droidhacker]

Now if only those rumors that Samsung is switching to PowerVR (at least for one chip) wouldn't be true. That would be quite disappointing, and it would make Mali graphics a lot less popular, while ensuring a monopoly for Imagination's GPU's in the mobile market.

If ARM does this, and embraces the open source driver, that would actually get people to ask Samsung and other manufacturers to start using Mali graphics. At this point ARM can NOT AFFORD not to do this, and it makes business sense for them to do it.

You mean for their own chips? Because all of the best samsung phones use Qualcomm SoC's (Adreno).

[frantaylor]

Huh? AMD actively supports the development of the open source radeon driver..

Yeah, NOW they do. When those contracts were signed, AMD was not in the picture. It was ATI management, and look what happened to them.

[frantaylor]

You mean for their own chips? Because all of the best samsung phones use Qualcomm SoC's (Adreno).

That's just an artifact of the technology cycles. samsung is aggressively moving into arm and they are perfectly capable of making chips like this. they decide on a case by case basis whether it is more expedient to build or buy for any particular product. Remember samsung is a really enormous company with almost unlimited resources. they have the working capital and the sheer size to dominate the arm market if they have a mind to. They could produce millions and millions of arm chips every year without selling any of them, they can just put them in their other products like their phones and their washing machines and their production machinery.

[frantaylor]

It's gonna take a fresh new design to get this new driver to take off. Nobody is going to try to shoehorn it into their existing products, it needs to get inserted into the product cycle at a very early point which means it's going to be a while (maybe quite a while) before you see any products with this new driver.