Broadcom should perform better on releasing documentation for VC6 and VC7The dude was talking about graphics performance of the Broadcom chip in the Pi. Well, it can only go so far. Rockchip and Amlogic branded socs are more common in TV boxes and some other SBCs out there, and if i am not wrong, they perform better on graphical tasks (hence they are preferred). Maybe Broadcom can perform better on other kind of tasks. We'll see.
So far it seems drivers are written blind by trial and error. VC7 for example can have blocks which use DMA to accelerate operations which goes completely unused. Likewise there can be options/flags to accelerate some mechanisms which we do "by hand" or even way to issue more draw calls to some kind of second engine - its unlikely such thing exist but it wouldn't be impossible if chip designer figured some things they do not need to design hardware scheduler for because it could be as efficient or even more efficient to give the power to the user how to do things - in this case the user has no idea they can do that and trying things at random will crash the SoC 99.99999999% of the time so its impossible to figure it out by trial and error.
Trying to look up information about these chips only Raspberry Pi comes up and given sale numbers it would seem there should be great negotiating position for Raspberry Pi Foundation to force Broadcom to release proper documentation for their chips.
Lack of documentation for the hardware is the biggest gripe I have with Raspberry Pi.
And even if having documentation would not materialize in one fps more in drivers it would still help tremendously in all projects which attempt to use GPU including any bare metal attempt. It is especially these projects which are hard to port to other SoCs and in effect tied to RaspberryPi platform and even depend on it using Broadcom.
Long term it would be best to choose chip supplier which is more reasonable regarding providing documentation...
Statistics: Posted by e8root — Fri Jan 26, 2024 6:47 am