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Benson's Avatar
Benson is offline Benson
2008-05-23 , 15:10
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#31
Originally Posted by qwerty12 View Post
Meh, I'm interested to see which will be more open and better (N900 or Pandora). I'm not a fanboy, if the competition is better, I will happily buy that instead.
From what I've seen, Pandora will clearly be more open. N900 isn't known well yet, but I think HW-wise, better is gonna be different for different people.

And it looks like we can run Debian on either of them (Thanks, JohnX!!), so openness isn't really a huge issue, from a practical perspective.

As I've said, I'm gonna get an N900 if it makes me happy; if not, I'll go for a P&|a, which should be cheap by then. Whichever way I go, I think the similarity of the devices (and some overlap of developer communities) will be a major bonus to both parties. We get emulators, they get Maemo Mapper... and we all collaborate on pulling OOo with our Miatas.
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fanoush is offline fanoush
2008-05-23 , 15:24
Posts: 2,152 | Thanked: 1,490 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ Czech Republic
#32
Originally Posted by sarahn View Post
......
As Mara mentioned you can buy a dev kit now http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/fold...dxevm3503.html for a paltry $1.5k
......
Nice one is (or will be soon) http://beagleboard.org/ for $150
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fanoush is offline fanoush
2008-05-23 , 16:22
Posts: 2,152 | Thanked: 1,490 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ Czech Republic
#33
Originally Posted by qwerty12 View Post
Meh, I'm interested to see which will be more open and better (N900 or Pandora).
I guess Pandora will be more open in the sense that there is no army of lawyers, UI designers, managers and other specialists that can veto any slightly radical idea in both software and hardware design ;-) OTOH there is also no army of coders and QA people that will polish the device for you so there will be a lot of rough edges for some time (or forever).

At least I expect it to be easier to get low level HW (schematics, pinouts) and SW info (bootloader etc) from Pandora guys than from Nokia. They are smaller and really need help from community. As for N900 I'm expecting yet another great internet tablet with poor gaming controls :-) We'll see.
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Last edited by fanoush; 2008-05-23 at 20:10. Reason: added QA people :-)
 

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Johnx is offline Johnx
2008-05-27 , 15:52
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#34
Originally Posted by Benson View Post
And it looks like we can run Debian on either of them (Thanks, JohnX!!), so openness isn't really a huge issue, from a practical perspective.
Hmm...I should clear up my stance. Openness is still a big issue *to me.* Right now Debian for the N8x0 works by cheating: It borrows libraries and closed source kernel modules from Nokia's OS2008. Once Nokia stops updating their hardware drivers to work with newer kernels (and their gstreamer/dsp stuff to work with newer libc) things will start to break. The other direction of openness that I care about is for Nokia's userspace apps included with the n8x0, such as media player, browser-ui and others. This is all Nokia's choice as a company as long as they follow the letter of the license, which it appears they are doing. However, it is our choice as potential customers to vote with our wallets if we feel openness of drivers and software is important to us.

Nokia: I care about openness and the openness of future tablets *will* affect my purchasing decision.
Users: Vote with your cash if you care.

-John
Last edited by Johnx; 2008-05-27 at 15:55.
 

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Benson's Avatar
Benson is offline Benson
2008-05-27 , 17:14
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#35
Yeah; I'm with you there, openness does matter; I was just saying that it's not huge (because less stuff is now troublesome, or more closed stuff can be replaced). Perhaps I wasn't very clear on that... I guess that emphasis should have been present in my previous post.

It will be a factor in my purchase, for sure, but so is the Pandora's form-factor (which I dislike). To me, these are comparable quantities, so depending on the actual N900, I could go either way.
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Mara is offline Mara
2008-07-28 , 17:16
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#36
Guess what? I just received my gift... it is a OMAP T-shirt.
 

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lardman is offline lardman
2008-10-07 , 19:51
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#37
http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=121

Nice, right at the bottom of the article:

Video For Free
Because of PowerVR SGX’s fully programmable architecture it can support video acceleration for free, without increasing the size and complexity of the core.

Video is a core competence of handheld graphics processors and is increasingly a must-have feature, not just in Personal Media Player products, but also other mobile devices. PowerVR SGX provides outstanding image quality and frame rates, offloading video codec processing (including MPEG-4 and H.264) from the main CPU. For video operations the host CPU load is minimal and the PowerVR SGX part can perform motion estimation, motion compensation and transform, residual generation, transform, quantisation, inverse quantisation, inverse transform, image reconstruction, and deblocking (H.264), making it possible to efficiently off load the tasks associated with video compression/decompression from the host CPU.

As well as enabling the playback of users own personal media content, PowerVR SGX’s advanced video capabilities will enable mobile services such as TV/video-on-demand and video messaging. PowerVR SGX also supports still image standards including JPEG and JPEG2000.
No idea whether these features are "exported" for people to use (or if we'd need to write our own code to run on the chip to do this), but sounds like it should be fun to work out what the best optimisations are (SGX vs DSP vs Cortex).

These are probably already in the thread, but just in case:

Ti doc on the SGX: http://focus.ti.com.cn/cn/lit/ug/spruff6b/spruff6b.pdf
Intel datasheet (contains an SGX so I understand, see ch9): http://download.intel.com/design/chi...hts/319537.pdf
 

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