Broadcom's Open-Source VC5 OpenGL & Vulkan Support Improving

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Broadcom's Open-Source VC5 OpenGL & Vulkan Support Improving

Broadcom open-source driver developer Eric Anholt has written his first status update on the VC5 driver activities of the new year...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VC5-Starts-Off-2018

[M@GOid]

Lets hope all this work is for a Raspberry Pi 4 with that GPU.

[BrandonB]

Lets hope all this work is for a Raspberry Pi 4 with that GPU.

I was just thinking the same thing. I think that when the RPi folks decide to upgrade to a chip with VC5, it will be largely because of this work. Maybe not for Raspberry Pi 4, but hopefully soon!

[willmore]

WRT the Raspberry Pi 4 idea: The rpi3 came out in Feb of 2016. Because it was released so soon after the 2, Eben was asked when the 4 should be expected. He said that the next board would be "a couple of years at least". He also ruled out >1GB of memory.

That latter on is widely understood to be because the Video Core IV simply can't deal with >1GB, but the VC5 doesn't have that problem. The reason I mention that is because Eben said both of those thing in close proximity and that has lead many to think that the reasoning is related--no Pi4 because we're at peak VC4, so no new board until we can work past that with VC5. Well, here's VC5 work being done, so speculation now makes sense.

If he is to be taken to be speaking the truth (and to be able to perfectly predict the future!), then the soonest we'll see a '4' is 'a couple of years'. That's from Feb 2016, so Feb 2018 meets the definition of 'a couple of years'.

Okay, I'm going to stop, anything more and I'll really be reading the tea leaves.

[FireBurn]

Whilst I do think a RPi4 would use one of these, I don't think it'll be the first to do so and February is a little soon. Hopefully we'll see it before the end of the year though

[caligula]

What kind of hardware should we expect RPi 4 to have? Gigabit LAN, 2 to 4 GB of LPDDR3 or LPDDR4, 4 x USB3, mini PCIe, strong 12V power plug, OpenGL 4.6 / OpenCL 2.0 / Vulkan ?

[bison]

What kind of hardware should we expect RPi 4 to have? Gigabit LAN, 2 to 4 GB of LPDDR3 or LPDDR4, 4 x USB3, mini PCIe, strong 12V power plug, OpenGL 4.6 / OpenCL 2.0 / Vulkan ?

Cortex-A55.

I think an external memory bus and USB3 would draw too much power, so I'm not expecting those.

[caligula]

Cortex-A55.

I think an external memory bus and USB3 would draw too much power, so I'm not expecting those.

So it would still have everything connected to a single USB2 bus?

[bemerk]

Before there is a new pi 4 hopefully the av1 codec spec is done and available in hardware

[starshipeleven]

What kind of hardware should we expect RPi 4 to have? Gigabit LAN, 2 to 4 GB of LPDDR3 or LPDDR4, 4 x USB3, mini PCIe, strong 12V power plug, OpenGL 4.6 / OpenCL 2.0 / Vulkan ?

Afaik chips of the same family of the ones with VC5 have an ethernet 100Mbit.

Give its low cost and power budget I really doubt anything major. A better processor/GPU and more ram, a dedicated 100Mbit ethernet, and maybe more than 1 USB host controllers, (SDIO wifi/bluetooth chip and whatnot).

What you describe is sold for like 100$ and has Marvell or NXP SoCs with Vivante GPUs, usually on SoMs too (to keep costs down).