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The Arm Manga Guide to the Mali GPU (2021)
- amelius 4y agoThe (necessary) limitations in the programming models of GPUs give me nightmarish flashbacks of 8086 segmented memory.
- pjmlp 4y agoSYSCL, CUDA and Metal Shaders are quite close to regular CPUs.
- endisneigh 4y agoI wonder if there is some sort of theory on graphical representation of complexity vs text. Is it possible to have a comic that explains something better than text alone, while being easier to understand? Usually these comics tend to hide complexity by simplifying things, which is fine. It’s an interesting thought to consider a man page as a comic.
- hummus_bae 4y agoIt's been tried. The problem is that you need artists of a very high skill level to really make it work, and even then it takes a while to perfect that level of artistry. It's definitely something I would love to see, but my guess is that the ROI on that type of tertiary content just isn't profitable enough right now.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoYes, read the classic 'book' Understanding Comics, which is itself a comic/graphic novel about theories and practice behind creating graphic novels and telling stories with the medium. As plain text it would be very dull and difficult to get the main points, but as a graphic novel it directly demonstrates how and why things work in the graphic medium. It's really an incredible book that should be read by anyone doing creative things. https://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/ https://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/
- riffraff 4y agoI thought of the same book as I was reading GP's comment, it's a perfect example, and a very engaging read.
- layer8 4y agoThe Cartoon Guide to Computer Science is pretty good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748916
- einpoklum 4y agoThey lost me at "playing games on the mobile is so convenient".
- Dalewyn 4y agoIt is, though: Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game boy Advance, DS, 3DS, Switch, PSP, PS Vita, Steam Deck, smartphones, et al.
- RobotToaster 4y agoIf anyone else is having trouble loading the site, my pihole was blocking turtl.co that they seem to be using.
- tommica 4y agoNeat, manga guides in general can be quite entertaining!
- corysama 4y agoThe Manga Guide to Databases really is a solid first introduction to the concept.
- SinePost 4y agoCaptain Zilog, anyone? https://www.zilog.com/captain_zilog/ https://www.zilog.com/captain_zilog/
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoThere's meant to be a third part but all the links to it are dead…
- johndoe0815 4y agoArm should rather invest some effort in providing documentation on programming their GPUs instead of comics...
- mouse_ 4y agoARM is a CPU architecture; honestly it should have nothing to do with GPUs. In practice, GPUs on ARM have served as hardware DRM. Want to update your cool Linux SBC? Haha, better hope the OEM wants to also, otherwise you're screwed. Want to develop a custom OS for your smartphone? Haha, "NO"!
- einpoklum 4y agoARM is a company, not an architecture. They offer processor core designs in several architectures of theirs. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_processors is a list of their CPUs, and CPUs based on their work. They also offer GPUs, e.g. the Mali line, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_(processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_(processor)
- gsliepen 4y agoWhile the situation is definitely undesirable, it's not Arm's fault that it is hard to update your SBC. Arm doesn't make the single board computers (SBCs), they just license processor designs to system-on-chip (SoC) vendors, and then other vendors build SBCs around the SoCs. You buy something from the SBC vendor, and they should ultimately provide you with support, but most of them just don't care. Ideally Arm would have created fully open source drivers, but they might have reasons not to, like having to protect their intellectual property (IP), or perhaps even IP they licensed from third parties that is included in their own products. Also, if no customer of Arm (and remember, you are not a customer of Arm, SoC vendors are) asks for an open source driver, they might not want to spend the effort making one. Arm is certainly not alone in this, it's the same for virtually all other mobile GPU vendor, and also NVIDIA doesn't provide open source drivers. Note that Arm does make updates to their closed-source user-space driver available (see https://developer.arm.com/downloads/-/mali-drivers/user-space https://developer.arm.com/downloads/-/mali-drivers/user-spac..., it also depends on a kernel driver but that one is open source) for some SBCs, however with SoCs, the problem is that there is a tight integration between components, and the GPU itself for example might depend on clock and voltage regulators added by the SoC vendor that the GPU has no control over, so only the SoC vendor can provide the software/patches necessary to make everything work together. Ideally the SoC vendor provides regular updates, which the SBC vendor passes on to you, but they often don't. Luckily, the open source community is working towards upstreaming all the various bits that the proprietary vendors neglect to, and there is the open-source Panfrost driver which is working for a wide range of Mali GPUs already. So some boards, for example the ASUS TinkerBoard, now fully work with upgradable, upstream kernels.