[Arm-netbook] [review] SoC proposal

[Gordan Bobic]

lkcl luke wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Vladimir Pantelic <vladoman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> lkcl luke wrote:
>>
>>>>  1) Is there GCC support for this SoC's instruction set,
>>>   yes.
>>>
>>>>  including VLIW,
>>>   don't know.  tensilica have a proprietary "pre-processor" compiler
>>> that turns c and c++ into VLIW-capable c and c++.
>> hopefully it does a better job than gcc generating arm NEON ... So far
>> only hand writing NEON works for speed.
> 
>  tensilica wouldn't have sold over 1.5 billion licenses for their RISC
> cores if it didn't do a decent job, eh?

There is a difference between selling it to one-off bodgers that are 
making Android slates and taking it to the level of being an open, 
common and long term supportable platform.

Source code transformation, IMO, is not good enough if you want a long 
term supportable product.

>>>   don't know.  tensilica have proprietary software libraries for audio
>>> and video CODECs already (obviously)
 >>
>> evil, closed, non-free? :)
> 
>  YEAH!  my faaavourite.  well it gets us to market quickly, _and_
> keeps the FSF people happy.
> 
>  woo-hoo.

So these "proprietary" software CODEC libraries are free and open source?

Gordan