After all, if you're old enough, you can claim that you were taught to write this way in half-uncial and that you can't teach an ancient dog new tricks.;-)
I am extremely interested in these (type of) products, the development of them, and any news related to them.
yeah. i mean - i'm a geek / software person. what the heck am i doing getting involved in hardware? ahh... because nobody else is - not with this kind of goal in mind, anyway, and certainly not with the same business aims.
but.... regarding the processor: we have to be quick! it's not going to be long before 40nm is outdated, and 28nm is "king". 28nm NREs and the whole verification process is... costly.
But in the real world, how you present yourself is key.
i know - that's why i said that when i write articles and books - "formal" writing - i use capitalisation. it's a conscious choice - one that only i can make.
How much effort is there to get things to work with touch screens enhanced with ntrig or wacom technology? I like touch screen technology, but at some point you do really need stylus close to a real pen.
oo. intriguing question. hmm, not sure i'm qualified to answer! my personal experience with wacom touchscreens has been limited to the Acer Travelmate C100, which i liked so much that when it fell to bits (i literally wore a hole through the shift key with my left fingernail for example) i bought a C112 as a replacement.
i found that it was quite easy - relatively speaking as far as being comfortable editing xorg.conf files - to set up the wacom drivers and configs etc. at the time i think they were serial devices, so there was a bit of a lag, but you got used to it.
then also i've seen someone wandering around in london victoria station with a tablet that was capacitive *and* had a stylus. i believe the stylus was set up to have the same impedance as a human, or something, but i'm sure i spotted some buttons on the side (like on the wacom electro-static styluses).
Doesn't apply if they are hardware manufacturers building stuff for you. Keeping the GPL part is your responsibility.
it's Copyright Law: it's the license. so it's the responsibility of anyone who distributes binaries - be it the SoC vendor themselves, or the ODMs, or the factories, or the distributors, or the retailers, or you. you shift it, you agree to the license - period.
Unless they build extra units and sell/distribute them without complying to the GPL. Is that what he means by not being friendly?
why use the A10? because it's around $7.50 in very large volumes, that's why. all its competitors are around the $11 to $12 mark. the other reason is: allwinner are actually trying, within the best of their ability and understanding, to actually work with the free software community. some things they Grok, others they don't. it's challenging, but it's exciting.
So, basically, "screw the end-users as long as we can shave $5 off the price."
*lol* - well... not exactly. if it was AMLogic for example, who screwed us over with GPL violations, then i wouldn't give a flying fuck if their processor was $5 i *still* wouldn't give them the time of day.
and the main reason for that is because if we propagate GPL-violating source code, it exposes our customers to risk of lawsuits - primary *and* secondary Copyright violations. so, we just flatly refuse to work with GPL violators, now, and that's the end of it.
well, people have worked out that it's using ICubeCorp's design.
I've heard that instead of a separate GPU that it contains more 3d type instructions as part of the native architecture.
yes. if you're familiar with MIPS64 and/or ARC (from synopsys) and/or Tensilica's DSPs, it's more like an extended instruction set that gets "farmed off" in some cases to entirely different engines, with their own pipelines. in this case, it's a suite of engines with their own hardware threads.
How long before we actually see these being produced?
from funding to actual silicon? as we're basically doing nothing more than "take some hard macros, add them, and put it through the verification tools" i.e. there is NO development (because the core has already been done, and proven), we've set a target of 8 months.
actually what we're probably going to do is simply add USB-3 host to the existing 65nm design, bump it up to 8 cores (from 2), and then have a *separate* team design a "USB3 Peripheral IC" with SATA-III, Gigabit Ethernet and so on. even if the two wafers end up on the same chip. what's great about that is that that USB3 peripheral IC is itself a great stand-alone product, so we're talking to a couple of teams (including some open hardware designers) about how to get this done.
And which compilers are they targeting for this new instruction set?
they have a compiler expert from SGI on-board, so they've ported Open64. and it has LLVM support as well. amazingly. open64 is an entirely different compiler, but a long time ago when it was started, they took the gcc front-end GPLv2 source code and used that - just wrote a different back-end. so, for the most part, the options are pretty much identical so you can do "EXPORT CC=..." and go from there.
(something to do with the architecture, Open64 is a better choice for them than beginning from gcc's back-end).
I just read through your posts and I can't find one.
:)
i reserve them for emphasis, articles, books and proper nouns. it's a hang-over from when i had RSI that was so bad i couldn't open jars and had to use two hands to turn the key to get into my house, back in 1996, reverse-engineering samba and not really getting paid enough to eat properly that winter. that, and i heard that because the human brain sees lower-case more often, it's easier on the eyes. so, i made a decision, and i'm sticking with it. nobody's given me a good compelling reason to change my mind: it's something i'll have to decide for myself.
This is not News for nerds. This is product placement.
yeah - 'innit great?... i tell you what: you take over. if you're prepared to deal with the suppliers and the free software community and keep up-to-date with the SoC vendors and so on, knock yourself out - i'm not going to stop you.
All these things quite well show the lack of commitment and complete blindness towards all the possibilities these kinds of SoCs could enable if only the software and the licenses were up to snuff. This brings me to the question: why choose the A10 when there are SoCs that atleast support the standard way of accelerating video through OpenMAX and/or GStreamer? Who does everyone seem to use Mali-400 when it's apparently very poorly supported? Is there any manufacturer who is even PLANNING to some day do a SoC with properly maintained and supported software package -- or better yet, release the programming documents to the wild so people can implement F/OSS software packages?
MALI's not actually owned by ARM, afaict, it's still licensed by ARM from Mediatek. the engineers *inside* ARM have been banging on at ARM to get this resolved. the management are not listening.
why use the A10? because it's around $7.50 in very large volumes, that's why. all its competitors are around the $11 to $12 mark. the other reason is: allwinner are actually trying, within the best of their ability and understanding, to actually work with the free software community. some things they Grok, others they don't. it's challenging, but it's exciting.
Sadly it seems like SOC development outpaces your ability to actually put it into a platform. Is this still going to continue for the foreseeable future?
good question! this first one was always going to be the hardest. it's taken.... almost a year to eventually find all the parts and suppliers. Mid-Mount HDMI was a bitch to track down. we'll still need to do the PCMCIA casework, and so on, which will need $6k for the endplate to be modified.
once that first one is done, however, we'll not only have pre-established relationships with all the suppliers, but we'll likely already have spare stock of some of the parts, *and* have the schematics to be able to cut/paste to create the next one, and so on and so forth.
so i fully expect subsequent cards to be vaaastly quicker development time. but, even there, it depends on the level of cooperation of the SoC vendor. if they don't provide EVB schematics, we can expect the PCB development to take longer. etc. etc.
remember - this is a project which will be going for at least the next decade. we're just getting started.
An advocate of Free Software, he's been round the loop that many are now also exploring: looking for mass-volume Factories in China and ARM processor manufacturers that are truly friendly toward Free Software (clue: there aren't any).
I don't think I needed anybody to tell me that one.
you might not - but there are a few people who don't know, and who want to find out for themselves. it's good that they do that, because when it all goes to shit, they're the ones who it's easiest to work with. it's not just academic for them: they now KNOW what the problem is (because they lost money or time over it)
Why should they care about Free Software? All they want to do is Charge Money, and the wishes of a bunch of free software advocates doesn't mean anything to them.
well, take a look at the allwinnertech.com web site. the community surrounding the allwinner a10 processor has grown sufficiently large that a number of community-driven entrepreneurial boards such as the cubieboard, hackberry and so on are actually listed as "Dev Boards" on allwinner's official web site.
if you recall HTC had a keyboard-based phone? techies and geeks loved it. when HTC's next phone wasn't a keyboard-based one, it absolutely tanked.
bottom line: don't underestimate the level of influence that free software people can have.
The good news is, they'll steal the free designs as readily as they steal the other ones.
Are we under the illusion there is a high-volume plant where management is thinking "gee, if we could only get some work from Free Software people, we'd be set".
it's much more fundamental than that. these are factories that in some cases quite literally make shoes, or jumpers, or... socks and handbags on the same floor or building. the owner went one day "i know i'll diversify: let me just go buy some PCB manufacturing equipment". the level of software expertise they have is LITERALLY zero. they buy ready-made designs, ready-made [GPL-violating] software images, and so on.
I like free stuff, but the religion which is Free Software seem to lose sight of the fact that the rest of the world isn't as interested as they are.
well, you need to read the articles online about how the Linux Steam/Valve Team got together with the Intel 3D Graphics Team. one of them described it as "the most productive work meeting they'd ever had".
there really *is* a business case for using free software. tie that in with the fact that many engineers buy stacks of tablets hoping to be able to buy 1,000 of them and use them as the basis for their custom products, but then they find that no, the source code isn't available, and bear in mind that geeks are some of the most influential people on forums which the average users frequent, and you start to realise that it's a bit bigger than you think.
You hear a lot of horror stories about unscrupulous factories stealing the basic IP from smaller customers. Is this something you're concerned about, and how would you deal with it if it did happen?
well, to be honest, i mean, what exactly are they going to "steal" here? think about it: linux is more expensive than windows because the number of CDs that it goes onto is greater. and if they "steal" the source code, and try to "hoard" it? congratulations to them: they just cut themselves off from community resources! so i'm really not that concerned about the software, although it's both hilarious and often frustrating to watch them try.
with the EOMA projects, however, it's a different matter: not because it's "stealing" per se but because of the risk of non-interoperability. i've posted about this before, about my uncle (anthony pickford) who used patent law to protect against dangerous copy-cat medicines [which were killing people - literally]. so we've followed his example, and have submitted 3 patents. patents tend not to go down too well in amongst the free software community - myself included - so i made them as extreme as i possibly could, on the grounds that i hope like hell that any companies which we ever need to go after will actually complain enough to get the patent system itself limited or shut down.
both! no wait - i'd rather shoot the horse-sized duck, make a fantastic meal out of it (quack) then tame the horses and sell them to circuses world-wide.
I made it this far down the page before saying it, but I can't hold back any more.
You have absolutely no clue what you're doing
that's right - i don't. that's why i'm asking peoples' input.
and because of that, if you're leading this project, I doubt any of it exists.
that's right: it doesn't. the idea is to get it made, with as little risk as possible, using building blocks that have been proven as much as is possible.
anything that's in the "planning" phase doesn't exist until it actually exists. what's wrong with that? if everyone followed the line you're proposing, nobody would ever make anything, would they?
tell me about it. please share your concerns. this is not being sarcastic: i need to know. i need to know what the right questions to ask are, because i don't know.
Hmm, one problem I have with the full GPL is that it *is* by design rather intent on spreading itself virally and to the exclusion of other legitimate models, and thus a restriction on what software the hardware would be allowed to run would be unfortunately in keeping with the GPL.
you are absolutely, absolutely dead wrong. waaayyyy off base.
I agree that that would be excessive, but then I think that the full GPL is generally excessive.
You may guess that I prefer to license my stuff under BSD licences to allow fully commercial uses. B^>
Rgds
Damon
and how's that working out in the android community? you've seen the list of GPL violations as people mistake "android equals linux", yeah? it's a serious problem, and it's why i started the whole rhombus-tech initiative: to get free software developers involved right from the beginning in the mass-volume industry, right the way through to sales in hypermarket retail stores. the "dream" if you will is for free software people to be able to walk into a supermarket and go go "fuckin'A! i helped write the software for that! you wanna buy one of these, grandma, i can replace the OS in no time, with something that i can manage remotely for you".
you have to remember that the BSD license was designed and written at a time when everyone trusted (because they knew them personally) everyone else in the industry. *everyone* shared source code. then fuckers like apple came along and went "thank you very much. BYE". at one point, microsoft's NT Team took the TCP/IP BSD-licensed stack, and put it directly into MSRPC (because winsock was so shit). it's almost 20 years later that Wine have finally reverse-engineered MSRPC. i really don't understand people who don't understand why the GPL is so necessary, i really don't.
unless you consider 1333mhz 32-bit DDR3 not to be a real memory controller?
Thanks for filling in that detail since I didn't know the precise specs (and for proving me right). To reiterate: No, this thing does not have a real memory controller compared to the 128 bit (2 channel 64-bit) or 192 bit (3 channel 64-bit) memory controllers in the AMD and Intel chips, respectively, that are mentioned in TFS.
it's clear that you're used to the x86 world. there's not a single embedded processor in existence that has memory controllers with those kinds of bandwidth. the fastest i've ever heard of is the AM3894 (and its DM counterparts) which has, if i recall correctly, two 32-bit 1666mhz DDR3 RAM interfaces.
not even the absolute latest ARM Cortex A15 from samsung has 128-bit or 192-bit memory interfaces.
please try to get some perspective, here. we're not building a 100-watt processor. i'm concerned about it going over 3 watts: i'd rather it was 1.5. that's a hell of a difference. it's well-known in the embedded world that you trade performance, power and latency, and it's well-known that that's an acceptable trade-off. if it wasn't, there would not be hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets in the world.
I doubt very much that the people who control the HDMI spec would allow an EFF-endorsed CPU to do this anyway -- the EFF has no interest in enforcing DRM, and HDCP pretty much requires you implement it end to end.
I'm not sure you could reconcile those two views.
funny you should mention this. i raised it with Dr Stallman because the same sort of thing occurred to me: why support DRM?? well... his answer was: the DRM in HDMI is so utterly broken that it's as if it didn't matter. therefore, he's okay with it.
which i find absolutely hilarious. DRM is okay, as long as the keys are available, one way or the other [thus making the DRM irrelevant, one way or the other]. this is primarily what the fuss over the GPLv3 is about, because of the endemic tivoisation that occurred a few years ago [and is still ongoing].
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After all, if you're old enough, you can claim that you were taught to write this way in half-uncial and that you can't teach an ancient dog new tricks. ;-)
cool! i'll have to remember that. mmm.... wait... first look up "half-uncial"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncial_script#Half-uncial
ok, i get it :) naah i don't want to claim to be an "old dog" - i haven't the luxury: things are moving too fast to do that.
I am extremely interested in these (type of) products, the development of them, and any news related to them.
yeah. i mean - i'm a geek / software person. what the heck am i doing getting involved in hardware? ahh... because nobody else is - not with this kind of goal in mind, anyway, and certainly not with the same business aims.
but.... regarding the processor: we have to be quick! it's not going to be long before 40nm is outdated, and 28nm is "king". 28nm NREs and the whole verification process is... costly.
But in the real world, how you present yourself is key.
i know - that's why i said that when i write articles and books - "formal" writing - i use capitalisation. it's a conscious choice - one that only i can make.
How much effort is there to get things to work with touch screens enhanced with ntrig or wacom technology?
I like touch screen technology, but at some point you do really need stylus close to a real pen.
oo. intriguing question. hmm, not sure i'm qualified to answer! my personal experience with wacom touchscreens has been limited to the Acer Travelmate C100, which i liked so much that when it fell to bits (i literally wore a hole through the shift key with my left fingernail for example) i bought a C112 as a replacement.
i found that it was quite easy - relatively speaking as far as being comfortable editing xorg.conf files - to set up the wacom drivers and configs etc. at the time i think they were serial devices, so there was a bit of a lag, but you got used to it.
then also i've seen someone wandering around in london victoria station with a tablet that was capacitive *and* had a stylus. i believe the stylus was set up to have the same impedance as a human, or something, but i'm sure i spotted some buttons on the side (like on the wacom electro-static styluses).
so, technically, it looks like it can be done.
this is a duplicate - here's a link to the first response: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3308811&cid=42253063
summary: it's a conscious decision, indicating "informality".
Doesn't apply if they are hardware manufacturers building stuff for you. Keeping the GPL part is your responsibility.
it's Copyright Law: it's the license. so it's the responsibility of anyone who distributes binaries - be it the SoC vendor themselves, or the ODMs, or the factories, or the distributors, or the retailers, or you. you shift it, you agree to the license - period.
Unless they build extra units and sell/distribute them without complying to the GPL. Is that what he means by not being friendly?
yes. it's down to Copyright Law.
why use the A10? because it's around $7.50 in very large volumes, that's why. all its competitors are around the $11 to $12 mark. the other reason is: allwinner are actually trying, within the best of their ability and understanding, to actually work with the free software community. some things they Grok, others they don't. it's challenging, but it's exciting.
So, basically, "screw the end-users as long as we can shave $5 off the price."
*lol* - well... not exactly. if it was AMLogic for example, who screwed us over with GPL violations, then i wouldn't give a flying fuck if their processor was $5 i *still* wouldn't give them the time of day.
and the main reason for that is because if we propagate GPL-violating source code, it exposes our customers to risk of lawsuits - primary *and* secondary Copyright violations. so, we just flatly refuse to work with GPL violators, now, and that's the end of it.
What can you tell us about the new SOC?
well, people have worked out that it's using ICubeCorp's design.
I've heard that instead of a separate GPU that it contains more 3d type instructions as part of the native architecture.
yes. if you're familiar with MIPS64 and/or ARC (from synopsys) and/or Tensilica's DSPs, it's more like an extended instruction set that gets "farmed off" in some cases to entirely different engines, with their own pipelines. in this case, it's a suite of engines with their own hardware threads.
How long before we actually see these being produced?
from funding to actual silicon? as we're basically doing nothing more than "take some hard macros, add them, and put it through the verification tools" i.e. there is NO development (because the core has already been done, and proven), we've set a target of 8 months.
actually what we're probably going to do is simply add USB-3 host to the existing 65nm design, bump it up to 8 cores (from 2), and then have a *separate* team design a "USB3 Peripheral IC" with SATA-III, Gigabit Ethernet and so on. even if the two wafers end up on the same chip. what's great about that is that that USB3 peripheral IC is itself a great stand-alone product, so we're talking to a couple of teams (including some open hardware designers) about how to get this done.
And which compilers are they targeting for this new instruction set?
they have a compiler expert from SGI on-board, so they've ported Open64. and it has LLVM support as well. amazingly. open64 is an entirely different compiler, but a long time ago when it was started, they took the gcc front-end GPLv2 source code and used that - just wrote a different back-end. so, for the most part, the options are pretty much identical so you can do "EXPORT CC=..." and go from there.
(something to do with the architecture, Open64 is a better choice for them than beginning from gcc's back-end).
yeah you can - comments are open. hey modders, biteme!
Quite -- what do you need 5 for? ;-)
So, did you lose track of your original log-in or something Luke?
I had somehow assumed that it was you that pointed me at /. in the first place.
*lol* - bloody hell, a 4-digit slashdotter. yeah i didn't actually create a login, took me a while...
starting your sentences with capital letters?
http://slashdot.org/~lkcl
I just read through your posts and I can't find one.
:)
i reserve them for emphasis, articles, books and proper nouns. it's a hang-over from when i had RSI that was so bad i couldn't open jars and had to use two hands to turn the key to get into my house, back in 1996, reverse-engineering samba and not really getting paid enough to eat properly that winter. that, and i heard that because the human brain sees lower-case more often, it's easier on the eyes. so, i made a decision, and i'm sticking with it. nobody's given me a good compelling reason to change my mind: it's something i'll have to decide for myself.
This is not News for nerds. This is product placement.
yeah - 'innit great? ... i tell you what: you take over. if you're prepared to deal with the suppliers and the free software community and keep up-to-date with the SoC vendors and so on, knock yourself out - i'm not going to stop you.
All these things quite well show the lack of commitment and complete blindness towards all the possibilities these kinds of SoCs could enable if only the software and the licenses were up to snuff. This brings me to the question: why choose the A10 when there are SoCs that atleast support the standard way of accelerating video through OpenMAX and/or GStreamer? Who does everyone seem to use Mali-400 when it's apparently very poorly supported? Is there any manufacturer who is even PLANNING to some day do a SoC with properly maintained and supported software package -- or better yet, release the programming documents to the wild so people can implement F/OSS software packages?
MALI's not actually owned by ARM, afaict, it's still licensed by ARM from Mediatek. the engineers *inside* ARM have been banging on at ARM to get this resolved. the management are not listening.
why use the A10? because it's around $7.50 in very large volumes, that's why. all its competitors are around the $11 to $12 mark. the other reason is: allwinner are actually trying, within the best of their ability and understanding, to actually work with the free software community. some things they Grok, others they don't. it's challenging, but it's exciting.
ahh, these 5-figure contributors. in myyy daaay, we dreeeaamed of having a 5-figure slashdot number :)
What does he mean by friendly? I thought the Chinese manufacturers don't care much as long as you give them money?
yeah. so those that don't honour the GPL, we don't give them any money. good eh?
Sadly it seems like SOC development outpaces your ability to actually put it into a platform. Is this still going to continue for the foreseeable future?
good question! this first one was always going to be the hardest. it's taken.... almost a year to eventually find all the parts and suppliers. Mid-Mount HDMI was a bitch to track down. we'll still need to do the PCMCIA casework, and so on, which will need $6k for the endplate to be modified.
once that first one is done, however, we'll not only have pre-established relationships with all the suppliers, but we'll likely already have spare stock of some of the parts, *and* have the schematics to be able to cut/paste to create the next one, and so on and so forth.
so i fully expect subsequent cards to be vaaastly quicker development time. but, even there, it depends on the level of cooperation of the SoC vendor. if they don't provide EVB schematics, we can expect the PCB development to take longer. etc. etc.
remember - this is a project which will be going for at least the next decade. we're just getting started.
I don't think I needed anybody to tell me that one.
you might not - but there are a few people who don't know, and who want to find out for themselves. it's good that they do that, because when it all goes to shit, they're the ones who it's easiest to work with. it's not just academic for them: they now KNOW what the problem is (because they lost money or time over it)
Why should they care about Free Software? All they want to do is Charge Money, and the wishes of a bunch of free software advocates doesn't mean anything to them.
well, take a look at the allwinnertech.com web site. the community surrounding the allwinner a10 processor has grown sufficiently large that a number of community-driven entrepreneurial boards such as the cubieboard, hackberry and so on are actually listed as "Dev Boards" on allwinner's official web site.
if you recall HTC had a keyboard-based phone? techies and geeks loved it. when HTC's next phone wasn't a keyboard-based one, it absolutely tanked.
bottom line: don't underestimate the level of influence that free software people can have.
The good news is, they'll steal the free designs as readily as they steal the other ones.
Are we under the illusion there is a high-volume plant where management is thinking "gee, if we could only get some work from Free Software people, we'd be set".
it's much more fundamental than that. these are factories that in some cases quite literally make shoes, or jumpers, or... socks and handbags on the same floor or building. the owner went one day "i know i'll diversify: let me just go buy some PCB manufacturing equipment". the level of software expertise they have is LITERALLY zero. they buy ready-made designs, ready-made [GPL-violating] software images, and so on.
I like free stuff, but the religion which is Free Software seem to lose sight of the fact that the rest of the world isn't as interested as they are.
well, you need to read the articles online about how the Linux Steam/Valve Team got together with the Intel 3D Graphics Team. one of them described it as "the most productive work meeting they'd ever had".
there really *is* a business case for using free software. tie that in with the fact that many engineers buy stacks of tablets hoping to be able to buy 1,000 of them and use them as the basis for their custom products, but then they find that no, the source code isn't available, and bear in mind that geeks are some of the most influential people on forums which the average users frequent, and you start to realise that it's a bit bigger than you think.
You hear a lot of horror stories about unscrupulous factories stealing the basic IP from smaller customers. Is this something you're concerned about, and how would you deal with it if it did happen?
well, to be honest, i mean, what exactly are they going to "steal" here? think about it: linux is more expensive than windows because the number of CDs that it goes onto is greater. and if they "steal" the source code, and try to "hoard" it? congratulations to them: they just cut themselves off from community resources! so i'm really not that concerned about the software, although it's both hilarious and often frustrating to watch them try.
with the EOMA projects, however, it's a different matter: not because it's "stealing" per se but because of the risk of non-interoperability. i've posted about this before, about my uncle (anthony pickford) who used patent law to protect against dangerous copy-cat medicines [which were killing people - literally]. so we've followed his example, and have submitted 3 patents. patents tend not to go down too well in amongst the free software community - myself included - so i made them as extreme as i possibly could, on the grounds that i hope like hell that any companies which we ever need to go after will actually complain enough to get the patent system itself limited or shut down.
both! no wait - i'd rather shoot the horse-sized duck, make a fantastic meal out of it (quack) then tame the horses and sell them to circuses world-wide.
yaay always wanted to do that :)
I made it this far down the page before saying it, but I can't hold back any more.
You have absolutely no clue what you're doing
that's right - i don't. that's why i'm asking peoples' input.
and because of that, if you're leading this project, I doubt any of it exists.
that's right: it doesn't. the idea is to get it made, with as little risk as possible, using building blocks that have been proven as much as is possible.
anything that's in the "planning" phase doesn't exist until it actually exists. what's wrong with that? if everyone followed the line you're proposing, nobody would ever make anything, would they?
tell me about it. please share your concerns. this is not being sarcastic: i need to know. i need to know what the right questions to ask are, because i don't know.
Hmm, one problem I have with the full GPL is that it *is* by design rather intent on spreading itself virally and to the exclusion of other legitimate models, and thus a restriction on what software the hardware would be allowed to run would be unfortunately in keeping with the GPL.
you are absolutely, absolutely dead wrong. waaayyyy off base.
I agree that that would be excessive, but then I think that the full GPL is generally excessive.
You may guess that I prefer to license my stuff under BSD licences to allow fully commercial uses. B^>
Rgds
Damon
and how's that working out in the android community? you've seen the list of GPL violations as people mistake "android equals linux", yeah? it's a serious problem, and it's why i started the whole rhombus-tech initiative: to get free software developers involved right from the beginning in the mass-volume industry, right the way through to sales in hypermarket retail stores. the "dream" if you will is for free software people to be able to walk into a supermarket and go go "fuckin'A! i helped write the software for that! you wanna buy one of these, grandma, i can replace the OS in no time, with something that i can manage remotely for you".
you have to remember that the BSD license was designed and written at a time when everyone trusted (because they knew them personally) everyone else in the industry. *everyone* shared source code. then fuckers like apple came along and went "thank you very much. BYE". at one point, microsoft's NT Team took the TCP/IP BSD-licensed stack, and put it directly into MSRPC (because winsock was so shit). it's almost 20 years later that Wine have finally reverse-engineered MSRPC. i really don't understand people who don't understand why the GPL is so necessary, i really don't.
Thanks for filling in that detail since I didn't know the precise specs (and for proving me right). To reiterate: No, this thing does not have a real memory controller compared to the 128 bit (2 channel 64-bit) or 192 bit (3 channel 64-bit) memory controllers in the AMD and Intel chips, respectively, that are mentioned in TFS.
it's clear that you're used to the x86 world. there's not a single embedded processor in existence that has memory controllers with those kinds of bandwidth. the fastest i've ever heard of is the AM3894 (and its DM counterparts) which has, if i recall correctly, two 32-bit 1666mhz DDR3 RAM interfaces.
not even the absolute latest ARM Cortex A15 from samsung has 128-bit or 192-bit memory interfaces.
please try to get some perspective, here. we're not building a 100-watt processor. i'm concerned about it going over 3 watts: i'd rather it was 1.5. that's a hell of a difference. it's well-known in the embedded world that you trade performance, power and latency, and it's well-known that that's an acceptable trade-off. if it wasn't, there would not be hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets in the world.
I doubt very much that the people who control the HDMI spec would allow an EFF-endorsed CPU to do this anyway -- the EFF has no interest in enforcing DRM, and HDCP pretty much requires you implement it end to end.
I'm not sure you could reconcile those two views.
funny you should mention this. i raised it with Dr Stallman because the same sort of thing occurred to me: why support DRM?? well... his answer was: the DRM in HDMI is so utterly broken that it's as if it didn't matter. therefore, he's okay with it.
which i find absolutely hilarious. DRM is okay, as long as the keys are available, one way or the other [thus making the DRM irrelevant, one way or the other]. this is primarily what the fuss over the GPLv3 is about, because of the endemic tivoisation that occurred a few years ago [and is still ongoing].