Chromebooks Powered By The MIPS Pistachio, Linux Support Evolving

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Chromebooks Powered By The MIPS Pistachio, Linux Support Evolving

While Google Chromebooks up to this point have tended to be ARM-based along with some using low-power Atom x86 SoCs, it appears Imagination Technologies is working towards some MIPS design wins for these Internet-focused devices. Imagination has been working on MIPS improvements within Coreboot as a ChromeOS partner...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chromebooks-MIPS-Pistachio

[gnufreex]

Two questions:

Is it 64-bit?

Does it have free graphics driver?

[mcirsta]

Two questions:

Is it 64-bit?

Does it have free graphics driver?

According to this : http://www.imgtec.com/mips/aptiv/interaptiv.asp it's just a 32bit SOC which is well ... not that great and being only a dual core you have to wonder how it will perform but I guess we'll see.

As for the graphics part of it I've told the Img folks they should do something about that if they really want more market share and to be better viewed among the community so we'll see how that goes. As usual the problem is management

[kobblestown]

I'll never buy any product containing a PowerVR GPU and I suggest every Linux user avoid them like the plague. One can only hope that there will be a proper free graphics driver so we can reconsider. But until then it's a no-go. It's a pity that Imagination controls MIPS and we are unlikely to see a MIPS core married to a decent non-PowerVR GPU.

[mcirsta]

I'll never buy any product containing a PowerVR GPU and I suggest every Linux user avoid them like the plague. One can only hope that there will be a proper free graphics driver so we can reconsider. But until then it's a no-go. It's a pity that Imagination controls MIPS and we are unlikely to see a MIPS core married to a decent non-PowerVR GPU.

Well it's not like ARM is any better with their Mali, still closed source , no difference to PowerVR. There was some work on LIMA but it seems that's not going anywhere so yeah, at least Intel is playing nice with open source and they're certainly selling Atoms cheap these days.

[chithanh]

Except that Intel launched Atom X3 with Mali graphics...

[mcirsta]

As they did older Atoms with PowerVR graphics but they're moving to their own graphics across the board so in 2016-2017 we should probably see only Intel graphics in all Atoms ( including those designed for mobile phones ).

[jhogan]

Does it have free graphics driver?

The pin control driver doesn't seem to mention any graphics related pins:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/2/23/706

so maybe the question isn't applicable.

[sykobee]

Given ASUS are about to release a quad-core ARM A17 based Chromebook, a dual-core MIPS Chromebook is looking decidedly wimpy, unless it's per-core performance is significantly higher.

And, of course, it won't be long until the ARM A57 based Chromebooks appear on the market, with 64-bit support. 64-bit support was supposed to be one of MIPS advantages, but ARM has simply soldiered on and got there whilst MIPS hasn't done anything.

[curaga]

Well, MIPS claims their best Warrior core matches Sandy clock-for-clock.