Raspberry Pi 4 achieves Vulkan 1.1 conformance, gets GPU performance boost

>you focused on supporting the official raspberry pi keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen you could circumvent a lot of the pains around driver issues

I'm afraid that's how closed, non-extensible systems are born, and later inevitably die.

A reasonable game is performance focused and is spending most of the computing power directly on itself (even if perhaps not optimally and not utilizing specific GPU hardware to its full extent) and not in OS routines, so an OS providing a specific "game mode" with only the bare minimum amount of OS the game needed to run can perhaps bring a 5% or 10% performance improvement, but not 50% and definitely not 100 times performance increase.

For software that was written in a performance insensitive way (i.e. not games) you perhaps could achieve a 100 times performance increase by a full rewrite avoiding various overheads. However, you would not really need an OS change for that, the main performance-relevant changes would be in the app itself and you can get almost all of that by running the optimized app on a standard OS - but you would need a rewrite of all the actual software.

The example of this article about UnrealEngine and Vulkan is a good illustration - a game targeting the specific hardware directly could achieve the same performance (and more!), however, they are not going to, nobody is going to rewrite the game because that's expensive, so getting an OS abstraction layer like Vulkan - which inevitably adds some extra performance overhead, not reduces it - is the only reasonable way to go.

Linux and NetBSD can be configured to be as good as if they were written just for RPI4.

Vulkan is mainly about reducing CPU overhead, don't expect it to do much for complex shaders or other things that are already GPU-bound.

Ecosystems with great UX and paid subscriptions plus a 30% cut on all transactions are far more profitable than the margins you make selling commodity hardware. Just ask famous phone manufacturers like Siemens, Nokia and Blackberry why that is. That's why SW dev salaries are much higher than HW dev salaries as the former generates way more revenue than the latter. That's why Apple doesn't roll out their own cloud datacenters and instead just gets Amazon, Microsoft and Google to compete against each other on pricing.

Apple only rolls out their solutions when they have an impact on the final UX, like designing their own M1 silicon.

And number two, selling chips comes with a lot of hassle like providing support to your partners like Intel and AMD do. Pretty sure they don't want to bother with that.

Before they start selling chips I would rather they open iMessage to other platforms to eliminate the bubble color discrimination.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SiFive-P...

Should be roughly M1 performance, but on RISC-V.

Other folks are starting to get there but only from the mobile device direction, e.g. Tensor. Maybe I should look closer at what Microsoft has done with ARM Surface.

It's not like Apple has a meaningful moat around state of the art silicon. And that's a Good Thing.

Broadcom chips are not available on the open market and they won't sell to you unless you are an enormous company(or have a "special relationship" as RPi did). Effectively you can only buy one attached to a Pi.

For the RPi4 specifically:

That GPU has hardware limitations that make it unable of OpenGL 3.0. However, it supports GLES 3.2.

If you want GL desktop minus the unsupported features by the hardware, you can set MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.3 for example. That will however never be compliant.

Vulkan has many extensions to allow it to work on hardware which doesn’t support the full feature set. (by not implementing them, instead of having only version numbers)