-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Somebody in the thread at some point said: > Michael Shiloh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Hi Michael > > Thanks for the update - here are some questions for the next one in a couple > of > weeks .... all just to keep the community amused til the _great day_ > arrives.... > and not more important than the internal work of you and the OpenMoko team... > > 1) General information about the Neo FreeRunner graphics capabilities. This > follows some comments I saw by raster and others in the IRC channel that there > were some limiting issues. What is the comparison to Neo1973 gfx? This > may > relate to what target market you are going after for FreeRunner.
Well I have no experience with GTA01, but I understand it uses a shared framebuffer architecture using the CPU's LCD controller, so it is "unaccelerated" but you have high bandwidth to the system memory to offset that. The GTA02 has a new "multifunction device" chip in there called a Glamo 3362, and the LCM is driven from the LCD controller on that device now. This Glamo thing has a bunch of interfaces coming out of it as well like an SD/MMC interface that is now used for the SD Card (the CPU's SD interface is used for WLAN over SDIO). The architecture of the Glamo chip is that is is basically a 16-bit peripheral for the CPU with its own private 8MB memory inside. This memory space is shared by the various units inside the device, including goodies like 2D acceleration, 3D acceleration, hw MP4 decoder, SD/MMC IO and more. Dodji has got some 2D acceleration going and xv last I heard, so this is a decent situation, and it being on X it is going to be easy to use. The thing that is not ideal about that chip is the 16-bit bus to the CPU, it is the limiting factor in bandwidth to the internal memory. You can still shove a fair amount of data down there though, IIRC Raster was saying it can reach 30MBytes/sec. Another side to that issue is that because there is a relatively large local memory in the Glamo, we can stash pixmaps in there and bitblit them internally for free, if I understood it. On the U-Boot side Glamo video and SD/MMC support is ported into U-Boot (including SDHC) and working. > 2) What is OpenMoko's plan to release FreeRunner > i) release when hardware and kernel are solid and before application software > is > polished. Community helps to polish software prior to full launch to "basic > end users" > ii) release when both hardware and software are polished. Will take a little > longer but will impress journalists more... What we need to do above all is confirm the hardware first as carefully as we can, because if we know everything is cool there we know we can fill in missing software jigsaw pieces later pretty much for certain. There are only a very few dark corners left we didn't poke into yet so this is going well. For apps, personally (ie, this is just my opinion) I think its fine if we target providing solid very minmal apps initially, again we can point at the memory on the device (it is stacked with memory), the standard X and libs provided, and its upgradability with package granularity to convincingly (well it convinces me :-)) say more apps are coming. - -Andy -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHtMiVOjLpvpq7dMoRAq6sAJ9+Y00dVSnkK22dbIrS83uihs+blACeKdJ2 J74wR4ebR9vghmmukq9COFw= =8z8I -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
