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The opaque, undocumented nature of mobile GPU is outstanding (not in a good sense). Intel CPUs are well document both by their documentation or by third party
by flakiness 5y ago
The opaque, undocumented nature of mobile GPU is outstanding (not in a good sense).
Intel CPUs are well document both by their documentation or by third party docs (like Patterson-Hennessy.) Although NVIDIA is less document than these CPUs, there are some well-written whitepapers including one for academic conferences. And these are the basis for the textbook coverage.
Compared to that, ARM or Qualcomm GPUs are totally a blackbox. I'd love to learn the specifics of mobile GPUs but there is no clue. I wonder how Collabora folks have figure out the instruction set architecture and other details.
- nix23 5y agoI really wished that Intel and AMD took a leading role in ARM, things would be so much more open in the mobile space.
- qwertox 5y agoInteresting point of view, this sounds plausible.
- pjmlp 5y agoAs if they don't have their own commercial agenda, like having used PowerVR SGX545 on their CPUs.
- nix23 5y agoAh yeah the cheap atom-intel way...
- CameronNemo 5y agoIntel and AMD, which have entirely closed source coprocessors on their chips.
- nix23 5y agoBut not drivers. >entirely closed source coprocessors on their chips Like every single Arm chip?
- CameronNemo 5y agoWhat ARM chip has a coprocessor with closed source firmware/OS running on it?
- KeepingItToasty 5y ago'Arm Is Now Backing Panfrost Gallium3D As Open-Source Mali Graphics Driver': https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arm-Panfrost-Going-Official https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arm-Panf... I think Arm is providing Collabora with some of the documentation they need to write the graphics driver.
- CameronNemo 5y agoWhile this is true now, Collabora devs did a lot of reverse engineering with little documentation to get a functional driver, then ARM started to pay attention. For a long time, ARM neglected efforts to develop open source drivers.
- flakiness 5y agoWasn't aware of this, but cool move on ARM side! Thanks for the tip! Looking at the code [1], some of files are indeed copyrighted to ARM. So they are actually providing some data. Also, the linked story mentions that qcom is also providing some support to thee opensource driver. Pardon my ignorance here. [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tree/main/src/panfrost/perf https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tree/main/src/pan...