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ARM's New CPU and GPU Will Power Mobile VR In 2017 (theverge.com)
An anonymous cites a story on The Verge: ARM, the company that designs the processor architectures used in virtually all mobile devices on the market, has used Computex Taipei 2016 to announce new products that it expects to see deployed in high-end phones next year. The Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU are designed to increase performance and power efficiency, with a particular view to supporting mobile VR. ARM says that its Mali line of GPUs are the most widely used in the world, with over 750 million shipped in 2015. The new Mali-G71 is the first to use the company's third-generation architecture, known as Bifrost. The core allows for 50 percent higher graphics performance, 20 percent better power efficiency, and 40 percent more performance per square mm over ARM's previous Mali GPU. With scaling up to 32 shader cores, ARM says the Mali-G71 can match discrete laptop GPUs like Nvidia's GTX 940M. It's also been designed around the specific problems thrown up by VR, supporting features like 4K resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and 4ms graphics pipeline latency.
..but they are not the present. Top-end processor/GPUs are just now getting fast enough for VR to work well. The next generation will be wireless connections to the PC doing the rendering. A fully integrated solution that doesn't suck is at least a couple generations away.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Will There be Mali Driver Source or a way to build for Linux without being tied to only one kernel version? Source is highly unlikely, but it would be nice to have some way to build mali drivers for Linux for other than the one kernel version they pick of if you require an RT kernel for you application. I'd even settle for a tool that modifies their binary so that you can at least build for the kernel version you need vs the only one they chose to release a binary for.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
That's the problem with Catholics - no sense of irony. If they had a sense of irony they'd have realized long ago that maybe, just maybe, torturing people and executing them in horrific ways like burning at the stake ... is not very Christ-like at all.
What does it have to do with Catholics? Non-Catholic Christians haven't done any better in the past.
50 percent faster than their current turd is still a hopeless turd. Their GPU is nowhere near adequate for VR, except with 1990s poly counts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Alternatively, you could employ a low-latency eye tracker and selectively degrade the parts of the picture that are currently in the peripheral regions of the user's field of vision.
Current solution don't work at a sufficient speed with a low enough latency.
Come to think of it, even *HEAD*-tracking is suffering from latency and rendering speed problems, to the point of being one of the big bullet point of the current crop of VR research.
Eye speed can be said to be too fucking fast for current-day VR solution to be able to keep up with it.
(Also currently, no rendering system I know of is designed to handle variable resolution. But it's not my area of expertise. And also, the kind of tile-based defered rendering that's popular on mobile GPU - see PowerVR - should be easier to adapt to variable resolution)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nvidia does have their own solution coupled with an ARM Core.
The platfrom is called Tegra, and it's one of the few Nvidia GPU for which, every once in a blue moon, the do throw a bone at Nouveau (opensource) driver developpers.
I have no peculiar informations regarding Nvidia's official (closed source) drivers for Tegra.
At least that's a platform that you can find on actual hardware released now.
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AMD is planning to release their own *home-made* ARM Core by 2017.
The platform is called K12 and unlike other ARM on the market, won't be based on a standard Cortex A7x by ARM, it will be AMD's own design.
There's a current technology preview for the platform called "Opteron A1110" (That one still uses a stock Cortex A53 core, but already demonstrates the kind of server AMD plans to build once K12 is finalized).
Currently they aim to target small servers (e.g.: NAS, etc.), so do not expect to see soon tablets and smartphones running on AMD K12
(Though eventually some high-end applications might be interested in using AMD K12s)
AMD has the best open source track of any GPU manufacturer:
- currently, with latest GPUs and APUs, the Linux kernel driver (i.e.: the DRM module) is completely open-source.
- the only difference is what the user runs atop of it.
- user can either run a full open-source stack on it (Mesa/Gallium3D) - (officially supported by AMD)
- or run the official closed source openGL library (which has replaced the former full closed source stack fglrx).
- eventually, they plan the consumer stack (i.e.: games and desktop) to be fully opensource (i.e.: integrate everything into Mesa, like Intel does already), and only keep the closed source stack for pro/workstation crowds (people running CAD software with weird needs).
- there are RadeonSI opensource driver developpers *on AMD's own payroll* (and conversly AMD regular driver developpers are also dumping opensource code - though not with the same quality level - see the controversy around their HAL)
This sound *very interesting* for the future, but as of today is limited to expensive (server) development boards based around still-cortex-based Opterons.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
... it's a mildly good thing that mobile SoC get support for high refresh and display bandwith. A higher refresh is better, even just for displaying white on black scrolling text. If you plug a cell phone into a monitor and run a linux-like desktop etc. (while charging from the same cable) it's a least a bit useful and the increase in power use is not a problem. I'd even play the old Quake 3 (back then, games were games!)
The only problem is high refresh monitors are also high margin ones, so you may well be able to get a low end 4k 60Hz monitor at $200 or a high end 4k 120Hz at $750.