[Arm-netbook] mali gpu reverse engineering lkcl may ignore | libre GPU discussion

[Bluey]

> On 24 Jun 2017, at 6:03 AM, Bill Kontos <vkontogpls at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 10:48 PM, Mike Leimon <leimon at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Honestly, I think that working together with people who are openly
>> developing a GPU design and who would probably be quite welcoming
>> of assistance from Luc would be a much better situation for him than if
>> he went back to trying to working on the lima driver. Perhaps a company
>> like si-five ( https://www.sifive.com/ ) or the risc-v organization might
>> even consider trying to sponsor a collaboration like this as having a good
>> open GPU implementation would certainly be a boon to them in the future.
>> 
>> Anyhow, that is my two cents.
> 
> That is a really good idea and luke had mentioned it multiple times in
> the past but keep in mind that gpus are an extreme patent minefield
> these days. Heck, intel can't solve some problems like memory
> compression on their gpus. But maybe someone should propose this to
> sifive or the risc v foundation. Something like a Berkeley sponsored
> program would be really interesting.
> 

Please excuse my ignorance in such matters but would it be possible to 
use a RISC-V or FPGA chip as an interim eGPU until such time that a more 
specialised chip can be developed and released?

I appreciate that RISC-V/FPGA chips are not likely to be well-suited to the task
of GPU processing but perhaps they would be better than no GPU at all.  

Once a specialised libre GPU has been developed, the RISC-V / FPGA chips 
could be repurposed as a CPU for other projects/computers/laptops/etc. and, 
hence, ensuring that they don't go to waste.

- Bluey