[Arm-netbook] Any ARM SoC has Open-Source access to hardware video decoder ?

[lkcl luke]

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Alexey Eromenko <al4321 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Surely it is a sad fact, that there are no hardware, that supports
> Free Software. No FSF-approved SoCs...

 well there are plenty of TI SoCs that don't have SGX - the OMAP 3503
for example.  and there are plenty of AM Sitara ones as well.  it's
just that... no mass-volume company in their right mind would bother
to put them into a product.

 so that's why we're talking to icubecorp, because their "UPU" as they
put it, would literally be the world's first mass-volume *desirable*
SoC that would satisfy both the mass-volume market *and* happen to be
entirely software-programmable using a software (libre) toolchain.

> While I agree that 3D is nice, the use-cases for it are limited.

 the use cases may be limited but the marketing justification is very
clear: no acceleration, no dice.

> Much more needed is the VPU stuff (hardware video decoder), more than GPU (3D).
> Once any SoC will do VPU, it will become so much more useful...

 yes.  the icubecorp UPU has dedicated parallel video instructions as
well as dedicated parallel GPU instructions as well as standard
multithreading general-purpose instructions - all of which are
supported by their port of the open64 compiler.

 l.