With IMG PowerVR mostly gone from Mediatek roadmap. Which means ARM Mali is effectively the GPU IP on Android, excluding Qualcomm Adreno which its market continue to shrink and concentrate on premium segment.
I wonder how far or how good Mali is now compared to others. I wish Chip and Cheese do compassion on GPU as well.
If only that would mean a better driver story across devices and Android releases.
Unless it is a Pixel or Samsung Sxy flagship device, chances are the driver, which will never get updated, it a box full of interesting developer moments.
Just go to chrome://gpu to check the amount of workarounds enabled in Chrome alone.
The Pixel 10 and 11 GPUs are offensively bad. Not only are the Power VR GPUs slow, and less capable feature wise than Mali and Adreno (Xclipse is still around too!), but the tile Google put in the Pixel 11 is actually an _older_ design than what they put in the Pixel 10. They just clocked it higher to make up the performance difference.
And then Google has the gall to charge basically flagship prices for their under powered junk.
Personally I don't buy flagship phones because I don't use their full compute capabilities anyway, but a Pixel 11 would cost 2x what I paid for my Pixel 8. For 0 GPU performance improvement.
I just can't wait to see it being tested in an actual phone. So far all the data are done on development board. If they are really as good as everything we have read so far, both Mediatek and Qualcomm are in big trouble.
If they open-sourced their userland drivers, and/or released their internal technical documentation, which would have a similar effect, they would open themselves to at least two big problems.
First, they would spill all of their secret sauce for others to "draw inspiration" from. And there is a lot of expensive secret sauce in there. Not all of it is protected by parents either; more on that below.
Second, they would make it a lot easier for competitors and patent trolls alike to seek litigation. One of the criteria thech companies have for filing a patent is how easy is it to detect when it is being violated. Open source your stuff, and you make it much easier for the competition to detect any violation.
And it is not like these companies are violating patents intentionally; much the opposite. But there are only so many ways to implement Vulkan or DirectX, and completely independent teams will come up with similar enough solutions, and with broad enough patents, that there will be overlap every now and then. That is why they file patents in the first place. Only the high cost of litigation and the risk of mutually-assured destruction keeps legitimate vendors from rattling sabers more often.
Then you have NVidia with their immense investment and advantage on the software side, from the CUDA runtime to countless libraries like CUBLAS and cuDNN. That investment goes much beyond a relatively simple Vulkan/DirectX driver.
So the question is less "why don't more of them open-source userland". The question is "why do any of them do it"?
Source: former insider with enough patents under my belt that I lost count.
Because most game developers aren't religious about APIs, they implement an abstraction layer in their engine, a practice since the heterogeneous 8 and 16 bit days, where all major games were mostly coded in Assembly, and move on.
Any conference talk schedule at one of these conferences (https://gameconfguide.com) will prove the point of how little they care.
It is all about gameplay, taking advantage of gaming IP, franchaises, how to squeeze the ultimate performance out of specific hardware, user engagement,....
You will find an occasional talk about open APIs, probably even done by some Khronos folks, and that's it.
Moats are obstacles against something you're trying to avoid. It can be competitors coming in, or customers going out. A moat could surround a prison to keep prisoners in. Some companies just choose to treat their customers as prisoners.
All the mainline kernel support is reverse-engineered. No help from Arm.
Thus there is a considerable lag for the support of newer Mali generations.
Some Linux distributions for various embedded computers with Arm-based CPUs and GPUs use closed-source GPU drivers from Arm, not the reverse-engineered Linux drivers, when the Mali versions are newer than supported by the kernel and Mesa.
The Arm GPUs do not have public technical documentation, not even at the level of NVIDIA, much less something comparable with AMD and Intel.
I liked it better when electronic components which didn't have very thorough detailed documentation were instantly recognizable as completely unsuitable for a production BOM. :\
>All the mainline kernel support is reverse-engineered. No help from Arm.
That's not true. Arm has been supporting the open source driver effort for the last couple years, but it's still behind the closed source one in terms of performance, features, and HW support.
The headline seems like a way to set themselves up to fail. The advancements are great, those features are definitely something a lot of developers and players are interested in, but comparing it to desktop immediately just sets the bar too high.
This is probably not about "mobile users" as in Android Phones & iPhone users .. but about the current (trendy) rise of handheld consoles ? Atleast that's what I think
With IMG PowerVR mostly gone from Mediatek roadmap. Which means ARM Mali is effectively the GPU IP on Android, excluding Qualcomm Adreno which its market continue to shrink and concentrate on premium segment.
I wonder how far or how good Mali is now compared to others. I wish Chip and Cheese do compassion on GPU as well.
If only that would mean a better driver story across devices and Android releases.
Unless it is a Pixel or Samsung Sxy flagship device, chances are the driver, which will never get updated, it a box full of interesting developer moments.
Just go to chrome://gpu to check the amount of workarounds enabled in Chrome alone.
Samsung is using AMD in upcoming premium chips? Small market share again.
Google just switched to PowerVR, didn't they?
Given the horrible GPU performance as well as thermal issues in Tensor G5 and G6, Google will have to switch back to Arm in G7.
Example benchmark showing how extremely far Google is behind:
The Pixel 10 and 11 GPUs are offensively bad. Not only are the Power VR GPUs slow, and less capable feature wise than Mali and Adreno (Xclipse is still around too!), but the tile Google put in the Pixel 11 is actually an _older_ design than what they put in the Pixel 10. They just clocked it higher to make up the performance difference.
And then Google has the gall to charge basically flagship prices for their under powered junk.
Personally I don't buy flagship phones because I don't use their full compute capabilities anyway, but a Pixel 11 would cost 2x what I paid for my Pixel 8. For 0 GPU performance improvement.
>Xring O3.
I just can't wait to see it being tested in an actual phone. So far all the data are done on development board. If they are really as good as everything we have read so far, both Mediatek and Qualcomm are in big trouble.
it's available in retail (the foldable phone variant) in mainland China since today
This Xiaomis second or third chip ever so I assume there will be problems.
Why did that happen?
All the hoopla about "neural graphics" just seems to mean various forms of upscaling (spatial, temporal, denoising).
I guess that's nice and makes sense on mobile, but it somehow feels a bit disappointing that realtime 3D is shifting from modeling to slop filters.
What about support in mesa?
Give it a couple years before Valve starts sponsoring someone to reverse-engineer it
I do not understand why vendors believe their software stack is a moat. It is an obstacle to me.
If they open-sourced their userland drivers, and/or released their internal technical documentation, which would have a similar effect, they would open themselves to at least two big problems.
First, they would spill all of their secret sauce for others to "draw inspiration" from. And there is a lot of expensive secret sauce in there. Not all of it is protected by parents either; more on that below.
Second, they would make it a lot easier for competitors and patent trolls alike to seek litigation. One of the criteria thech companies have for filing a patent is how easy is it to detect when it is being violated. Open source your stuff, and you make it much easier for the competition to detect any violation.
And it is not like these companies are violating patents intentionally; much the opposite. But there are only so many ways to implement Vulkan or DirectX, and completely independent teams will come up with similar enough solutions, and with broad enough patents, that there will be overlap every now and then. That is why they file patents in the first place. Only the high cost of litigation and the risk of mutually-assured destruction keeps legitimate vendors from rattling sabers more often.
Then you have NVidia with their immense investment and advantage on the software side, from the CUDA runtime to countless libraries like CUBLAS and cuDNN. That investment goes much beyond a relatively simple Vulkan/DirectX driver.
So the question is less "why don't more of them open-source userland". The question is "why do any of them do it"?
Source: former insider with enough patents under my belt that I lost count.
Because most game developers aren't religious about APIs, they implement an abstraction layer in their engine, a practice since the heterogeneous 8 and 16 bit days, where all major games were mostly coded in Assembly, and move on.
Any conference talk schedule at one of these conferences (https://gameconfguide.com) will prove the point of how little they care.
It is all about gameplay, taking advantage of gaming IP, franchaises, how to squeeze the ultimate performance out of specific hardware, user engagement,....
You will find an occasional talk about open APIs, probably even done by some Khronos folks, and that's it.
opens wikipedia (Emphasis mine:)
> Moats were excavated around castles and other fortifications as part of the defensive system as an obstacle immediately outside the walls.
Unfortunate wording?
Moats are supposed to be obstacles for your competitors, not your consumers.
Moats are obstacles against something you're trying to avoid. It can be competitors coming in, or customers going out. A moat could surround a prison to keep prisoners in. Some companies just choose to treat their customers as prisoners.
It's akin to building a moat inside the castle.
Why?
I thought these GPU were open source with mainline kernel support?
All the mainline kernel support is reverse-engineered. No help from Arm.
Thus there is a considerable lag for the support of newer Mali generations.
Some Linux distributions for various embedded computers with Arm-based CPUs and GPUs use closed-source GPU drivers from Arm, not the reverse-engineered Linux drivers, when the Mali versions are newer than supported by the kernel and Mesa.
The Arm GPUs do not have public technical documentation, not even at the level of NVIDIA, much less something comparable with AMD and Intel.
I think you are confusing Apple and Arm.
Mali drivers are contributed by Arm:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/MAINTAINERS
I liked it better when electronic components which didn't have very thorough detailed documentation were instantly recognizable as completely unsuitable for a production BOM. :\
>All the mainline kernel support is reverse-engineered. No help from Arm.
That's not true. Arm has been supporting the open source driver effort for the last couple years, but it's still behind the closed source one in terms of performance, features, and HW support.
The headline seems like a way to set themselves up to fail. The advancements are great, those features are definitely something a lot of developers and players are interested in, but comparing it to desktop immediately just sets the bar too high.
This should have happened years ago.
The worst opening ever "Demands from mobile users continue to grow.". I stopped reading bullshit
This is probably not about "mobile users" as in Android Phones & iPhone users .. but about the current (trendy) rise of handheld consoles ? Atleast that's what I think
What's up with that? Younger generations don't even play on PCs anymore.
Why is it bullshit ? Just because you dont need does not mean it’s not real