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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

That's not the case on any of the models I've been complaining about (ODROID XU4, Raspberry Pi), nor the PocketCHIP (according to this). They have various solutions available to access the GPU. It's just that the drivers don't/didn't work.

> Heck the Adreno 2xx which was one of the first real-ish GPUs was released in 2009 and even then you'd be lucky to get any sort of reasonable fill rate out of it.

Adreno 200 is one of the worst offenders! There was no excuse for not being able to call glTexSubImage2D() without crashing the driver (for example). Qualcomm had the money to create a working driver; they just didn't.

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Yeah.

Sure, tape-out may be cheaper with one chip line, but we aren't talking about chips where the feature is there in silicon but intentionally disabled (say, for the other more expensive variant). We're talking about a feature that the chips and systems are advertised as having, which doesn't work as it is intended to because the driver stack is broken. Where the vendor specifically says '....supports OpenGL ES x.x', but then you find it sort of does but not really and it's broken and won't ever be fixed.

It's even more frustrating because there's a whole open-source community that would be willing to do the work of writing the drivers even, but then of course the vendors won't give them the data they need because of IP concerns. It just really sucks.

OpenGL was never an advertised feature of the C.H.I.P as far as I can tell. Economies of scale mean that it's cheaper to reuse a tablet SoC and just ignore the GPU entirely than it is to use a chip where all the functionality is available. The GPU probably works fine in its intended application, low-end Android tablets.

Well the ODROID and RPi have two different IP stacks, Broadcom is a bit better since they own the IP but I wouldn't be surprised to see Arm charging for Mali support.

Each vendor has their share of driver/hw problems, some are just more widely published than others :). That bug was gnarly on the 200, but it was fixed. If the GL feature wasn't included in Android's HWUI renderer all of the major vendors had at least one thing wrong.

> I wouldn't be surprised to see Arm charging for Mali support.

That's a problem, if so! We wouldn't accept "we won't give you working drivers for the hardware you bought unless you pay us" in the PC world; we shouldn't accept it in the embedded world either.

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