Intel Publishes DRM Driver For PowerVR Video Decoder! VP8 Decoding!

[Ardje]

Does that mean that the CE5315 atom as used in the thecus N2520 will get more linux support?
I'd rather run a 3.18 kernel on my N2520, than have video decoding capabilities...

[Gusar]

Not quite correct; the very first netbooks (for example, Atom N270) used i915-family graphics. I know this because I'm still using one (AOA150).

Yeah, I have one of those too, except mine is an AOA110, Acer's very first netbook , these things have a GMA950 (gen3), which is indeed Intel's. I meant of the non-Intel GPUs, GMA500/600 and GMA3600/3650 are the only ones found in netbooks, so you could easily know which netbook not to buy. There's a few more non-Intel GPUs, but you'd only find them in tablets.

[Ibidem]

Of course you did, it was very well known what's pvr: GMA500/600 (Poulsbo) and GMA3600/3650 (CedarView). Netbooks never used anything but those. Pure Intel was GMA3150 (Pineview). So very easy to know what to steer clear from.

Nowadays there's no problem, Baytrail netbooks and laptops actually use Celeron and Pentium brands with an N in front of the model number - for example, Celeron N2805 or Pentium N3510.

Not quite correct; the very first netbooks (for example, Atom N270) used i915-family graphics. I know this because I'm still using one (AOA150).
But those did disappear pretty quickly, which is why I bought an AMD-based laptop (Thinkpad X100e).

[Gusar]

Come on, Intel, it's not THAT old.

It's older than Ironlake and Intel doesn't care about that anymore. And that's with Ironlake being Intel's own GPU!

The thing is though, even if Intel wanted to do something about Poulsbo, what could they, considering the Poulsbo GPU isn't theirs? It's PowerVR you should be yelling at.

[kneekoo]

Nothing about Poulsbo?

When I saw Intel and PowerVR and hoped I'd read Poulsbo somewhere in the news... but nothing about it. This sucks so badly... Come on, Intel, it's not THAT old. There are way older drivers still in action, but Poulsbo (GMA500) is still poorly supported.

[Gusar]

But you never knew if you were getting a "real" intel when intel was printed on a chip.

Of course you did, it was very well known what's pvr: GMA500/600 (Poulsbo) and GMA3600/3650 (CedarView). Netbooks never used anything but those. Pure Intel was GMA3150 (Pineview). So very easy to know what to steer clear from.

Nowadays there's no problem, Baytrail netbooks and laptops actually use Celeron and Pentium brands with an N in front of the model number - for example, Celeron N2805 or Pentium N3510.

I see no reason to steer clear of Baytrail. Intel did exactly the right thing, they ditched pvr in favor of their own GPUs, which have full open source support. I can confirm this first hand, since two weeks or so I have a netbook with a Celeron N2806. This thing is awesome, out-of-the-box OpenGL 3.3 (the hardware can do more, but mesa currently can't) and hardware video decoding (the Intel media block: mpeg2, vc1 and h264), all fully open source. And with the code released today for the pvr media block, VP8 joins the other three codecs. Not that I care much about VP8, but hey, for completeness sake .

BTW, it was mentioned back in July on the libva mailing list that this code for the VP8 decoder is coming: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ly/002514.html, so this announcement today isn't a surprise to me.

[Adarion]

Imageon Technologies have custom vendor-specific drivers for each customer.
So this PowerVR driver by Intel driver will useless for PowerVR on non-Intel hardware.

Best is stay as far away from shitty PowerVR as you can.

Exactly that. And for me that also included intel. (Not only for ImgTec stuff though). But you never knew if you were getting a "real" intel when intel was printed on a chip. Could as well be Poulsbo type stuff and then you were lost.
And yes, "custom vendor-specific drivers" was told to me by some X hackers (incl. libv) years ago, too. That is really the problem so even reverse engineering is quite futile since you'll only gain support for one specific chip.

[GT220]

http://vr-zone.com/articles/first-look-new-features-cherry-trails-gpu/64068.html

http://wimages.vr-zone.net/2013/11/CTT-GFX2.png

14nm Cherry Trail/Braswell ditches PowerVR VXD394 for Intel's own Gen8 media decoder.

[agd5f]

Wait, so Bay Trail includes two different hardware decoders for video?
Wow, that's... inefficient.

Each hw block supports different video formats. In most cases the blocks should be able to be power gated so they won't really use much additional power when not in use, so really the only downside is additional die space.

[uid313]

Imageon Technologies have custom vendor-specific drivers for each customer.
So this PowerVR driver by Intel driver will useless for PowerVR on non-Intel hardware.

Best is stay as far away from shitty PowerVR as you can.