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Posts: 269 | Thanked: 93 times | Joined on Feb 2008
#105
Originally Posted by PowerUser View Post
As for me, TI is an amazing company. Sadly, this is BAD amazement. They called OMAP 'open', first O in OMAP means exactly this. However, no, Luke, you can't have datasheet. And yes, it is a top secret how this CPU boots up. And it is top secret which peripherial set it has and how to control all this. Really 'open' CPU. Huh. Ti has nice view on what "open" means, probably that was sort of sarcasm from them. And TI is AFAIK pretty mad in features licensing so you can have a bunch of hardware which can crush the mountains but actually for you it is just a dead metal. Yeah, there is 3D, yeah, there is video decoding accelerator... and no, YOU can't use them.
Maybe I'm wrong, but all the ARM technology is something licensed by ARM ltd to other chip vendors (in this case TI) that use the ARM core in their embedded processors.
The fact that TI pays a fee to ARM ltd to use its technology doesn't mean that TI can give every specs to the public: just the "things" added by TI and licensed by itself can be "opened" to the public...
It's not easy to be "opensource" in real life, because there's always somebody ready to sue you for a copyright infringement (Just look at apple, they patented the square/rectangular form with a round/wheel interface and a colour display used in media reproduction devices...).

Looks like I wasn't wrong after all http://www.arm.com/products/licensing/licencees.html

Last edited by JustNick; 2008-07-18 at 08:02.