On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:26 PM, Jed <jedi.the...@gmail.com> wrote: > Considering that in the specs for the reference card it was highlighted > as part of the silicon... Wouldn't it be safe to assume that it's > something that'd be unlocked by drivers? > > But if that were true, what is their motivation in not wanting to enable > it? (assuming they still haven't)
The features of a given piece of silicon do not always match what a company has ultimately licensed. This is especially true for things like codec support which can have significant royalties that have to be paid. Hence it's possible that while the chip *in theory* could support some particular codec, that doesn't mean that the firmware that ultimately got licensed has the necessary support. Regarding component support, it's entirely possible that although the chip supports it, it may have been cost prohibitive to put the supporting hardware on the PCB. It's ultimately up to the product vendor to decide what subset of the functionality on the reference design to ship with. Of course, everything I said in the above is complete speculation (based on my own previous experience working for a company that makes hardware), as I have no actual knowledge of why they chose to take the approach they did. Devin -- Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs http://www.kernellabs.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
