ARM Unveils Three Second-Generation Mali GPUs 29
Barence writes "ARM has taken the lid off three new Mali T600 graphics chips that form the second generation of its mobile Midgard architecture. Designed for use in smartphones, tablets and smart TVs, the three chips range from four to eight cores, improve performance by 'up to 50%' and offer greater efficiency. ARM expects devices to begin appearing with the chips this time next year."
Re:Open source drivers? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's been mentioned before . Many times the hardware may have features that are not yet fully developed or licensed. I remember Nvidia saying this about Linux driver and shader languages - that GLSL wasn't licensed for Linux or something. Then you have patent trolls who will jump at every keyword as evidence that you are violating the patents they bought off craigslist or ebay. Your mention of "geometry tree" might mean list of vertices, To them, it's their super-spiffy collision detection algorithm, so you end with paying lawyers large sums of money to fight it out on your behalf. You might also get the odd nutter or academic department who will go off and patent a future feature enhancement documented in the comments.
Like the early days of the PC, somebody figured out a way of reprogramming the real-time clock to drive 8 Kilohertz interrupts so low-quality sound could be played on the internal speaker. They actually patented it, even though it completely scrambled all file update and creation times.
Given the rate of change that is going on (GLES 3.0 [khronos.org] is out today, it would be very confusing for developers if ARM had one version of the driver that supported the current standard, and the user community has their own with custom extensions.