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A birthday present from Broadcom
- leigh_t 13y agoThis is awesome news. I hope other vendors follow suit.
- LukeB_UK 13y agoThis is great news. Hopefully this means that ports of android and chromiumOS will be able to utilize this.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago>"Earlier today, Broadcom announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license. The source release targets the BCM21553 cellphone chip, but it should be reasonably straightforward to port this to the BCM2835, allowing access to the graphics core without using the blob. As an incentive to do this work, we will pay a bounty of $10,000 to the first person to demonstrate to us satisfactorily that they can successfully run Quake III at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi using these drivers. " At last!
- marincounty 13y agoJust $10,000? Nice gesture, but they can afford to dig a little deeper. Their card running Quake III at reasonable frame rate on a Pi is a big deal, and these cheap skates know it. (I hope the person who figures it out, doesn't give them the code; just show them and collect $10,000 (A years rent in a bad part of Oakland).
- dredge 13y ago(a) They are a charity. (b) They demonstrated the Pi running Quake 3 at a reasonable frame rate in 2011. There's a picture of it in the blog post. (c) The competition rules say "To submit an Entry, and Entrant shall email a link to a public GitHub repository containing the full source code for the Entry..." so just showing the result wouldn't be eligible to win. That and they already know what it looks like, because of (b).
- sneak 13y agoThey aren't really a charity; they sell a product from a manufacturer (the Broadcom SoC) and were started by Broadcom employees. So, in a way, this "charity" is really just a marketing subsidiary of Broadcom.
- jpwright 13y agoThey are a UK-registered charity organization, and the Raspberry Pi is much more than just the Broadcom SoC.
- ansible 13y agoWhatever RasPi is, the fact remains that they're selling a relatively open platform at price near production costs. And that platform just got significantly more open. And they are now offering a bounty for the creation (refinement, really) of more free software. Which will benefit the entire community surrounding the RasPi. So that is good. Even if they were offering $10 USD, there might be someone who'll take up the challenge just to get the bragging rights.
- Narishma 13y agoQ3 is already running on the Pi using the proprietary drivers. This competition is for porting these new open sourced drivers to the Pi and using them to run Q3.
- malkia 13y agoIt could be that $10,000 is the amount some mid-to-high level manager can probably write off. Also $10,000 is a significant amount of money.
- patrickyeon 13y agoThat's really a surprise. Broadcom is cemented in my mind as one of the hardest companies to get even basic datasheets out of. I know the saying is "don't look a gift horse in the mouth", but could it be that their graphics cores are not competitive in pure technical capabilities, so they've decided to compete on open-ness? I'm not really involved in that area of hardware/software.
- ebenupton 13y agoNope (though note, I'm biased for several reasons). In terms of performance per unit area and performance per Watt, VideoCore IV is about as good as you're going to get. There are chips with higher performance GPUs out there, but they get there by brute force: throwing area (and therefore cost) and/or power at the problem.
- stingraycharles 13y agoThis is confirmed by the recent move of AMD towards extremely hot GPUs. You already see that in the most recent 290x, but they're talking about making hardware that is comfortable running at >100C. I'm not sure how relevant that is with regards to performance per watt, but I do know that heat is one of the most expensive (by-)products of electricity.
- wtallis 13y agoThat's not really relevant. Broadcom's VideoCore competes against the likes of PowerVR, ARM's Mali, and Qualcomm's Adreno. Those GPUs are all designed for mobile use, and cannot easily scale up to compete with desktop/workstation-class GPUs due to architectural differences and fab process differences. AMD's chips aren't egregiously power-hungry, they just sell into a market where the product segments are defined by the thermal and electrical limitations of the PCIe expansion card form factor. It will always be the case that the top of the line card draws as much power as can be delivered through the slot and two extra connectors, and as much as can be dissipated through a two-slot cooling system. If AMD can safely operate their chips at a higher temperature, then their cooling system will be a bit more efficient, so their thermal envelope expands a bit and they can increase performance by a few percent. Early indications are that NVidia's upcoming Maxwell architecture achieves significant efficiency improvements due to being designed with mobile use in mind, but it hasn't yet been demonstrated in a large enough configuration to compare against high-end desktop graphics chips.
- noonespecial 13y agoThis has been my biggest disappointment about the raspi since day one. If true, this is huge news indeed.
- 13throwaway 13y agoThey donate to WebKit? I thought that was fully funded by apple.
- davexunit 13y agoThis is a step in the right direction. Does this mean that the RaspberryPi can run blob-free now or with one less blob? I don't know what else is needed for the SoC to operate.
- mhurron 13y agoFrom the article - "This isn’t the end of the road for us: there are still significant parts of the multimedia hardware on BCM2835 which are only accessible via the blob."
- davexunit 13y agoAh, thanks. Poor reading comprehension on my part.
- ebenupton 13y agoNot quite yet. We're hoping to be able to provide a minimum-functionality blobless world fairly soon.
- MrZongle2 13y agoI think this is another example of how Raspberry Pi Foundation's decision not to move forward with a gazillion different boards, but rather to stick with A and B and let the software evolve, was a good one. I'm very excited to see what the next year brings.
- simcop2387 13y agoYea with this happening I think what I would love is a bit more cpu power on the pi. Not even the new 64bit arm cores or anything but an A-15 or A-9 at double the MHz of the existing PI would put it in a huge sweetspot for embedded performance and make it far more usable for a desktop (with ideally more ram too but that's always good).
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- josh-wrale 13y agoI wonder if anything GPGPU will become of this... I'm thinking it's probably not possible. OpenCL?
- ZeroGravitas 13y agoOne of the bullet points on the broadcom blog post is: "Write general-purpose code leveraging the GPU compute capability on VideoCore devices"
- josh-wrale 13y agoKeen eye (and mind).. Thanks.
- justin66 13y agoIt's great news. It's also not quite enough to get rid of the entire binary blob, as the article notes near the bottom. (I have the feeling some didn't read that far.)
- rcarmo 13y agoWell, let's see if someone can get Android to use the GPU now. And yes, I'm not expecting miracles -- even though Broadcom never released their 4.x port, what they demoed on the-teaser-video-that-was-never-followed-up-on seemed "fast enough" for a number of purposes.
- mik3y 13y agoIIRC one of the bigger obstacles to RPi Android support was that the driver libs were linked against glibc. There will be other bumps, but just getting these linked against bionic will be a big help. I'd love to see Android support, if only for Android's recovery system and read-only system images.
- jxf 13y agoIf you want to go straight to the horse's mouth and just start hacking (this is Hacker News, after all!), the Broadcom downloads are here: * BCM21553 VideoCore IV graphics driver source: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/Brcm_Android_ICS_Graphics_Stack.tar.gz http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/Brcm_Android_... * BCM21553 VideoCore IV documentation: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-AG100-R.pdf http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-A...
- ansimionescu 13y agoGood ol' gzip download, because fuck source control. edit: FWIW, a friend who works there told me flat-out to just avoid them (I'm job-hunting)
- CamperBob2 13y agoLook gift horses in the mouth much? Why "avoid" them?
- nandhp 13y agoIt sounds like ansimionescu might have been told that Broadcom isn't a good place to work.
- petermonsson 13y agoIt is open source. You can put it on Github if you want to.
- jxf 13y agoGenerally speaking, that's not what "open source" means. Reading the license agreement is always required to determine if that's actually okay to do. In this case it's okay as long as you reproduce the license in any redistributions (e.g. hosting it on GitHub).
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- Danieru 13y agoThis is incredible. Thank you Broadcom!
- monk_the_dog 13y agoI'm building an environment for computer vision, and I recently made a client that can run on the rpi (two minute video if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSigkvbpb_Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSigkvbpb_Q). I'm not exactly sure what possibilities this opens up, but I'm definitely going to dig into it and find out.
- tejbirwason 13y agoProud to have worked on this during my 8-month internship at Broadcom. It remains one of the toughest and rewarding projects to tackle within the company. I am pleasantly surprised to see Broadcom open up like this and release the full documentation. A step in the right direction for a grossly under-rated company.
- samolang 13y agoI've never heard of an 8-month internship. What sort of program is that? Like a semester+summer?
- cbhl 13y agoProbably a co-op program with a University. the University of Waterloo often does 4-month and/or 8-month (depending on the program); the University of Toronto does 12-month, in partnership with companies that are looking to woo students before they've even finished their undergrad. (Usually it involves the school designing the academic program and shifting when courses are offered (including putting courses in the spring/summer) to accommodate the work term.) The grandparent appears to go to the University of British Columbia, judging from their profile.
- Elv13 13y agoMy university (Montreal ETS) also do it. They have 3 (real/full) semesters per years. Students usually take 1 of them per year to work as interns. You can technically work as intern for like 5 years and still be considered enrolled into the engineering program. Students will either prefer 8 months internship for well paid jobs or jobs that cannot be done in a 4 months development cycle(like a video game). In the end, it does increase the total time spent to graduate, but students tend to have much lower debts (if not profit) at the end. These kind of deals seem to be quite widespread in Canada (just like the above commenter show). I know these private sector <-> teaching organization deals are not well considered in some part of the world, but, in the end, someone who just graduated, but accumulate years of full time working experience have an easier time landing a job at the end, at least for STEM jobs.
- rdb 13y agoI remember how satisfying it was to get that demo to work back in 2011 (thanks to the help of Dave Emett). Feels like an incredibly long time ago now! I wonder what framerate people will be able to achieve...
- rwg 13y agoBut we’re incredibly proud that VideoCore IV is the first publicly documented mobile graphics core Wasn't Intel first by virtue of using their in-house "HD Graphics" hardware in Silvermont (Bay Trail-M and -T)? Regardless, this is a huge thing in the ARM world, and I hope other vendors will begin to open up documentation.
- ebenupton 13y agoGood point. Still hard for me to remember that mobile != ARM these days.
- kllrnohj 13y agoBay Trail-M means "mobile" as in "laptop", not "mobile" as in "smartphone". Intel's smartphone stuff all still using PowerVR, including the upcoming Merrifield which will be using the PowerVR G64x0.
- zurn 13y ago> In common with every other ARM-based SoC, using the VideoCore IV 3d graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver The Lima driver for ARM Mali is open source and runs Quake 3!
- wolfgke 13y ago> The Lima driver for ARM Mali is open source and runs Quake 3! But the Lima driver was created by reverse engineering instead of using publicly available documentation.
- makomk 13y agoAny open source replacement for the Raspberry Pi GPU driver is going to rely pretty heavily on reverse engineering too. The code they've released runs on the VPU, a custom-designed scalar processor within the VideoCore IV that Broadcom still haven't released architecture documentation or a toolchain for. Without a whole bunch of low-level reverse engineering (much of which was already in progress) it won't even be possible to compile the stuff Broadcom have released. Without working VPU code you can't even boot the Pi, let alone make use of graphics.
- ebenupton 13y agoThat's not correct. The code that's been released is for BCM21553, which doesn't have a VPU. There are bits and pieces of VPU assembler in there, but they're unused on the ARM target. The intention is that people port this (ARM-based) drop to run on the ARM on BCM2835. No reverse engineering required.
- makomk 13y agoAh, that makes more sense, thanks! There's an awful lot of vestigial VPU-related stuff lying around the source tree, including what I'm guessing are the unused remnants of a dead build system...
- Argorak 13y agoCelebrate the open source release of the drivers by giving out a price for making a non-free software run on it? Also one that the intended audience of the hardware is not allowed to play? Seems a bit odd. (The Quake 3 engine is open source and free nowadays, but the assets and maps are not, so you cannot run "Quake 3" without using the demo. So "Quake 3" is non-free.)
- angersock 13y agoErm, I'm pretty sure you can use a shareware version (!) of the Q3 assets. Or any of a number of other things. The idTech2 and idTech3 engines are standbys of the open sores community--it makes sense to use them for testing graphics drivers. You are far more likely to encounter a bug in your driver than in those engines.
- Argorak 13y agoEven if free as beer, the demo version is non-free, in an open source sense. Sure, but you could use any of the many projects built on the open Q3 engine that are actually free as in speech. (And maybe child-friendly) Also, to be clear: I find it odd, but still a fun endeavor.
- CamperBob2 13y agoWho, other than certain parents with opinions they can't scientifically justify, says anyone isn't "allowed to play" Quake 3?
- Argorak 13y agoIn Germany, giving Quake 3 into the hands of minors is an offence, for starters. So, in our case, these nice people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Department_for_Media_Harmful_to_Young_Persons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Department_for_Media_H... Like it or not.
- georgemcbay 13y agoOn the one hand as someone who owns half a dozen Raspberry Pis this is really cool news and I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth. On the other hand, ARM vendors really have to start opening everything up much more than they have or Intel is going to start eating their lunch in the small embedded Linux arena, and I suspect Intel's mobile resurgence with Bay Trail is at least partly behind this "gift" to us all.
- penguindev 13y agoI don't know anything about mobile, but I've been looking at replacing my htpc ION system (edit: not that it really needs it, frankly it works great) and fanless baytrail boards/cases look very interesting. More cost than a pi + pi codec licensing obviously - but not that much, and all open as you pointed out...
- userbinator 13y agoI looked up the documents on it and Bay Trail is surprisingly open for an Intel SoC... although there's probably still plenty of stuff they won't tell you about.
- paulofisch 13y agoThe main touchy-feely moment for me here is that a notoriously closed, $17-billion company was brought around by a friendly, gentle approach to convincing it to be more open. Group hug for Broadcom.
- zanny 13y agoSame could be said of their (albeit paltry) wifi open driver support since 2011. They at least have one now, for very few chipsets. Doesn't work with any of the half dozen Broadcom NICs I have in my "junk parts" bin, though.
- BenSS 13y agoWould be awesome if we soon see OpenCl on the RPi. Now I've got to go find mine!
- caycep 13y agoQuick noob question...is the Pi still the best/most flexible option for general hardware hacking? What about ARM dev boards from Samsung, Qualcomm etc?
- blacksmith_tb 13y ago'Best' can measured in a few ways, the RPi has a huge community, and it's certainly a bargain (though you will end up buying a bunch of odds and ends to get going). The Beaglebone Black is probably the other major contender, way more GPIO pins, can boot from the onboard memory, is ARMv7, for $10 more.
- krasin 13y agoBeagleBone Black has just one USB port, which is often very inconvenient. For example, if you want to run Octoprint accessible via WiFi and control a 3d printer, two USB ports will be needed. Certainly, a USB hub is an option, but it makes the setup more brittle (some USB WiFi dongles won't work over some hubs) and more expensive.
- blah32497 13y agoOh woah - I'm very happy about the BSD license. This means people can more easily potentially spin up business around this platform. I wonder why they chose it... Does anyone have any insight?
- ebenupton 13y agoBSD-like licenses seem to be the standard for userland graphics libraries. There's a lot of useful stuff in there (for example the shader compiler) that may be of general use elsewhere, and we wanted to make sure people could use it. The 3-clause BSD is a compromise - we're happy for the stuff to be used but it's nice to get some credit :)
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- blah32497 13y agoThank you for the clarification. It seems overly generous =) Often code is GPL'd with pricey licenses for commercial applications - which always makes me think twice about investing my time into familiarizing with it. I'm very impressed they aren't trying to make a quick buck here. It sounds like they have a very innovative long term strategy that will pay off many times over. I think your competition is also fantastic, as it will encourage people to open source their improvements. Thank you for all your hard work Dr.Upton
- ebenupton 13y agoYou're most welcome. Good times.
- aswanson 13y agoWow. In due time these guys might start actually releasing datasheets to developers who, you know, need to know the register set and API to like, make their chips work. I don't know why the hell these idiots treat their firmware APIs with Manhattan-project style secrecy, but I would highly advise against designing a new product with a broadcom chipset. They are totally asinine.
- userbinator 13y agoWow. Much open, such surprise. What next, a full BCM2835 datasheet? To put in the words of Torvalds: "Hey, this time I'm raising a thumb for Broadcom. Good times."
- stbtrax 13y agoI don't think you can even start a new product with a broadcom soc if you're not already a huge player.
- tomphoolery 13y agolol i lost it... > Okay, so sue us: we launched on February 29. > Please don’t sue us.
- pja 13y agoThis is genuinely great news & a vast improvement over the previous graphics driver! Hopefully this means we'll see proper DRM / Gallium support for the IV & I'm looking forward to seeing what people can come up with now that they have full access to the GPU. Congrats to Eben & the team - you've done good.
- glennos 13y agoMy favourite part of this announcement is: * Okay, so sue us: we launched on February 29. Please don’t sue us.