Originally posted by agd5f
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Purism's Librem 5 To Rely On Secondary Processor For Binary Blobs
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I want to know how (if) they are going to set up the radio? Between Qcomm, Ericsson, Apple and Intel there is a lot of territory to avoid.
If anything, it may not support *any* advanced modulation schemes for data. So it will be great for GSM voice but any scheme beyond GPRS may require those blobs once again.
I am more fascinated to see how far they will actually get with this than actually owning one.
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Originally posted by edwaleni View PostI want to know how (if) they are going to set up the radio? Between Qcomm, Ericsson, Apple and Intel there is a lot of territory to avoid.
They have no other choice, really.
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Originally posted by madscientist159 View PostThis sounds more like wanting to keep a cheap ARM chip than to actually investigate options. I know POWER9 won't work in a phone, but surely the appropriate technology could be licensed from e.g. IBM and a proper chip fabbed at the quantities expected for a phone?
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Just one nitpick:
That's the ONLY Arm chip on the market that's supported (somewhat) by open-source software. It's not like Purism has much choice...
I think this move is simply about time-to-market. Maybe with time they could implement open-source DDR PHY training for the phone, but if that delays the launch by 6 months, maybe this is not the right time to do this. They can do it for V2 if there is a V2.
Originally posted by madscientist159 View PostThis sounds more like wanting to keep a cheap ARM chip than to actually investigate options.
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Originally posted by coder111 View PostJust one nitpick:
That's the ONLY Arm chip on the market that's supported (somewhat) by open-source software. It's not like Purism has much choice...
Afaik only POWER processors have open firmware for the RAM controller at all, so it's not like they could have chosen a "more open" SoC anyway.
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I dont know what's the big issue. 1) I think this is being designed taking into account privacy AND performance, and making the best available decision to have some of both. As some ppl said before,it's basically low-level firmware that goes and stays unmodified, so it behaves basically as hardware. but in this case, it's even BETTER than hardware, because 2) being all in a separate flash device, eventually anyone can load an opensource code to replace the blob and have the entire cake and eat it too. So it's just about having a good understanding of what's actually happening and the technical implications of the decisions, instead of just pulling a Stallman without the actual knowledge of how things work.
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