Broadcom Hurricane 2 & Allwinner R40 Supported By Linux 4.15

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Broadcom Hurricane 2 & Allwinner R40 Supported By Linux 4.15

More ARM platform upstreaming has taken place for the Linux 4.15 kernel development cycle among other ARM hardware improvements...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ARM-Linux-4.15-Platforms

[tildearrow]

Missing dot:

and others

[andrei_me]

Texas Instruments still exists? I thought they went bankrupt when they stop producing the OMAP series for smartphones...

[starshipeleven]

Texas Instruments still exists? I thought they went bankrupt when they stop producing the OMAP series for smartphones...

FYI: Texas Instruments is a bigass IC designer, they make a ton of stuff like for example battery charge/discharge controller chips and large amounts of signal processing chips (analog ICs) used pretty much anywhere.
They have like 3 billion dollars of net income as of 2016.

ARM SoCs were a foray into a new market for them (that kinda failed).

[SystemCrasher]

TI manufactures a lot of crap, ranging from standard logic family ICs and opamps to smart power management ICs to CPUs. Basically, Ti OMAPs were pwned by competitors, Ti has failed to compete on emerging market, being too slow to develop and improve their ICs. So competitors have got better CPUs at better prices. TI FAIL. But they still manufacture some stripped down versions of OMAP-like things for embedded and so on. Not to mention busload of other kinds of ICs. So they aren't bankrupt, lol. I guess most ppl doing anything related to electronics would notice Ti going bankrupt (and it would be pain in the rear for many of them since Ti does not ends on OMAPs).

As for "new market" - wrong, they've been there a lot of time. If we take a look on rise (and fall) of Nokia we could eventually figure out many Nokias were using some customized OMAP flavours. Smartphones even used two OMAP-like things at once, one for modem and one to run Symbian and user apps. The internals (e.g. boot ROMs dumped by someone) suggest these things are spin-offs of OMAPs. So Ti have sold hundreds of millions if not billions OMAP or OMAP-like ICs all around the globe. Nokia once held lion's share of mobile markets and it seems Ti has been part of this. Probably they were best selling "mobile" CPUs for quite some time. Nokia and Ti had long term relationship in this regard. Some Ti power managers appear to be respin of custom ICs Nokia phones were using, probably Ti also took part engineering of these and later used experience to create "generic" solutions not bound to Nokia only or cell phones only.

Part of Nokia downfall could be attributed to Ti FAIL. Nokia got used to OMAP so badly they never considered changing CPU. Once Ti became uncompetitive, Nokia had it really hard, eventually facing the fact their HW is kinda obsolete, competitors use far more powerful HW and they can't really handle it real fast since they lack expertise in anything but OMAPs. Maybe it would give idea why vendor locks are bad