Demo Of The Lima Driver On The KDE Spark Tablet

[Sonadow]

short and true answer: YES ! i sell my last android phone(192mb ram) because of this.
I'm sick of having less ram than i need for my apps.
i can handle a slow cpu but less ram than i need is a nightmare for me.
maybe i don't need the lastest openGL standard i only need at minimum openGL 3.2! because of WINE. (sure also for an ARM device emulating x86+directX )

Which ****ing moron runs WINE on a smartphone? Oh wait, you ARE a ****ing moron.

OpenGL 3.2? Then please get your arse out of Linux: Mesa 8 only supports OpenGL 3.0 Go back to Windows, moron.

[Sonadow]

Anybody in favor of sending a request to the forum admins for banning idiots like Qaridarium on the grounds of:

- being a general all-round idiot who cannot phrase a simple sentence properly
- has proven himself / herself to be incapable of listening to logic and always wanting to troll such discussions
- being a certified idiot and numbskull? Oh wait, i said that one already.

Anyway, with that out of the way, I'm not sure I want 64-bit ARM SoCs any time soon, if only because my current Windows Phone 7 smartphone (an old LG Optimus 7) is already mighty fast as it is, and the last thing we need are for mobile app developers to start jumping on the 64-bit bandwagon by delibretely writing inefficient code that consumes more memory and power than it really needs.

I remember how my computer science lecturer always described the pros and cons between 32-bit and 64-bit computing: one is a cheap Toyota Corolla (32-bit) and the 64-bit processor is like a Hummer. Both will get you from point A to point B, but if you are only going to transport 1 passanger most of the time, the Toyota gets the job done faster, more efficiently and more cheaply than the Hummer which drinks gasolene like there is no tomorrow, starts up slower and drains more power to get you from point A to point B.

Same analogy applies for smartphones and tablets: they are not going to replace the traditional desktop PC and notebook seeing as their primary use is for on-demand communications while on the move, so why have them waste precious battery uptime with redundant technology like 64-bit and, ugh, 4GB of RAM? I sure as hell don't want to pay $1000 for a '64-bit smartphone with 8GB of RAM', yucks, but i'll readilly pick the smartphone that has a SoC with a 32-bit CPU core clocked at 1.6GHz (yes, i'm looking at THAT well-known SoC), 1GB of RAM and a price tag which done not burn a hole in my wallet.

Unfortunately, numbskiulls like Qaridarium won't be able to see that logic.

[DarkCloud]

Go KDE

The biggest problem with KDE on any tablet is that it looks terrible. And its behavior is no better. No design just a giant hack. KDE looks ok on a desktop because the desktop paradigm that it follows is rather an old standard - title bars consisting of close, expand, minimize buttons, etc. These don't translate to the tablet

KDE needs a lead UI designer to control the whole user experience. And as much as I don't like the Unity desktop supported by Gnome, I think in the end it is going to win out on mobile devices (and desktop). The reason being is that you have one guy at the top paying the bills (Mark Shuttleworth ) giving him the last word on how things should look and behave. Granted Mark may be no Steve Jobs, but the one person control is a model that really can't loose,unless the guy at the top is really incompetent.

Maybe I am wrong, that KDE has a UI plan and a committee or single person controlling things. If they do its has really failed in my opinion, as they keep working on bringing fourth newer technologies (now QML) and the semantic desktop, for which the average user just doesn't care about. Right or wrong uses want an IPhone/ITablet experience. Those who can afford to choose have spoken with their wallets, and when given a chose they buy Apple products.

I'd like to see KDE emphasis less on the "Be Free" and focus on competing with other UI's that are out there.

Viva KDE

[libv]

the ARM company don't think this is nonsense because they work on 64bit ARM cpus.

you can do the same with a 32bit chroot in a 64bit system without using PAE.
and outdated + bad software from bad companys are not an argument for 32bit.

and again i accept the argument: "Its cheaper"

amd+intel are only duopolist monopole mafia companys and because of his the price is so high.

BOM?

sorry SoCs is just a buzzword in the end it dosn't matter.

sure its cheaper (but in my point of view its the only argument)

sure but you buy it for: no 64bit, less memory ram ,much slower
for me "Be slower with less features" is not a feature.

in the end the driver support wins the radeon driver for example do have a bad power management. But i don't think you have the man power to beat the radeon driver in features and power management.

but maybe you are the master of the universe ?

no sorry for me is cheap only cheap and not crap.

512mb ram is really the bottom,,, i would prefer 1gb and more ram.

i just wait for the version with minimum 1gb ram, dualcore cpu.

and if not only cheap a 64bit cpu+more than 4gb ram. and a openGL3.3 gpu

Ultrabooks are already pushing what is possible with x86 today. x86 is having trouble scaling down from its normal envelope. ARM is having far less trouble scaling up. The money each side has to spend to be able to compete on equal footing, is a few orders of magnitude different. In the space where quantum physics already is limiting what is possible, scaling down is nigh impossible. Scaling up however...

BOM is Bill Of Materials.

About me being the master of the universe, i am not, but you are overlooking one key fact there: Without me, and the massive amount of modesetting work i put in to push ATI over the line where they could not go back, there wouldn't be a free driver for ATI Radeon today. If i and my two suse colleagues had not been obstructed by ATI (and redhat) as much, and had been allowed to continue our stellar work, things might have looked pretty different today. We were pushing hard for any information on power management in 2007/2008, and we were hearing all the time that such things are board specific and therefor fully and utterly depend on atombios. We were seeing the bugs and crap in atombios all the time, and fixing things in our C code. If anyone could've figured atombios based stuff out, it was the three of us. I personally do not understand the hold-up, especially not why it is still being held-up 5 years on. And that in itself only strengthens the fact that if it wasn't for me and Egbert Eich and Matthias Hopf (who pushed the first free software triangle out of r600), we wouldn't have a free ati driver today.

And do you really want a 64bit cpu, 4GB of ram, and the latest openGL standard in a mobile device today? Get real, or wait another year or two, or maybe get a phone the size of 80s cellphones.

[libv]

Q: you spew quite a lot of nonsense here.

First off, i have been running 32bit operating systems for quite a while here. Even on the brandnew laptop i had to install 3 weeks ago. Reason: maemo6 build system was not too happy on 64 bit, and the PowerVR driver shipped for the N9 definitely did not build on a 64 bit system (i am not sure whether they have fixed their buildsystem already). PAE gives me the advantages of 64bit without such disadvantages.

Now, as for arm being cheaper... If you take a rather severe mental shortcut, which you definitely do here, then yes, arm is cheap. Others will see this because ARM seems to be the right tool for the job.

Advantages of ARM based SoCs versus x86 CPUs + chipsets are:
1) Purpose built set of functionality in a single package:
* single chip, lessened BOM.
* less complex routing: cheaper board, and much, much cheaper manufacturing.
2) Lessened power requirements:
* less cooling needed.
* smaller battery for same battery life.

Right tool for the job definitely equals lower price. Your use of the word "cheap" with the "crap" connotation is simply completely off.

But, this tablet is cheap as in crap though, it is the bottom end of _useful_ tablets you can buy. And it is useful, it plays a nifty angry birds, youtube videos, just what its target audience needs. It already is lightyears ahead of the previous generation of cheap chinese tablets though, and therefor a nice toy. I might end up buying my 60y old mother one, she seems the perfect user for a tablet like this.

[Adarion]

@Michael Phoronix
OMG, that chocolate thingy makes my brain rush out Dopamine like crazy even from seeing it!


Hopefully this KDE tablet will see some working free drivers because that would be finally an inducement to buy a tablet for me. Still the price difference with an extremely similar tablet that is already being offered is somewhat ridiculous. And then having known GPL violations... humph.
We just recently had this discussion about a GPL free busybox so "accidental GPL violations" would be a thing of the past. I actually wonder how enterprises that employ more lawyers than engineers (the proposal came from Sony, Tim Bird) can "accidentally" violate any license. You see where this will lead to. I mean, if they were so scared about their crappy code they could still do a cross license agreement with the devs and give them money instead of free code back.

The problem is also that fewer companies deliver assemble-yourself computer parts (that is what made x86 PC so great, you had modularity everywhere and could exchange and combine things like you needed) and there is more non-general-purpose stuff that is closed and limited. Because the "willing mindless stupid masses" are buying it without hesitation or thought. Cellphones completely locked and closed, with branding and all kinds of nonsense. Unrepairable, unexchangeable accumulators and so on.

I really hope these devs will manage to get a free system running, that would also be worth the extra cost for me.

[smitty3268]

Missing the point

The Zenithink C71 is already available -- by default it ships with Google's Android. The Zenithink C71 sells for $180~200 USD in the US, which makes it $80~100 USD less than what the re-branded KDE Spark is set to retail for with its open-source desktop experience. Sure, some of the proceeds of Spark sales benefit the KDE project, but you might as well buy the unimpressive Zenithink hardware that's already available and you can always donate any amount of money independently to the KDE project (or any other worthy free software project) and load the open-source software yourself.

Sure, you can grab the same hardware and load all the software manually for free. But I hope not many people are actually going to do that. Please support the idea of having an open stack running on tablets by buying them. Don't support the buying of GPL violating hardware. You better believe that lots of people are going to be looking very closely at how well this KDE tablet sells. If it's a flop, you can kiss any chance of linux tablets not running android goodbye. A success could lead to lots more, possibly even bringing in other players like an Ubuntu tablet, e17 tablet, and so on.

It's kind of like the humble indie bundles - sure, you can buy them for a penny, but if we want things like that to continue we have to make sure they appear to make business sense.

[popper]

i don't understand the hype about closed source hardware?

sure they write opensource drivers now but other hardware do have opensource drivers supported by the hardware company them self.

for example a amd-hardware based table. [tablet]

for example: MSI WindPad 110W

in the end they only hype the ARM chip based solution only because its "cheap"

Wrong, show me an Open AMD ARM 3D implementation then we will talk, AMD have Not written any 3D Floss code for their gfx as found inside the so called massive "infotainment" sector, as found inside the freescale ARM A8 i.mx5 device in the years its been available, thats right AMD don't open oss their gfx,bsp,sdk in the ARM space ether.

ARM routinely measure their SOC on performance/Milliwatt (The milliwatt is equal to one thousandth (10⁻³) of a watt) not performance/watt , show me any x86 based core SOC (System On a Chip) today that can say the same and mean/show it generally

[devius]

i don't understand the hype about closed source hardware?

sure they write opensource drivers now but other hardware do have opensource drivers supported by the hardware company them self.

for example: MSI WindPad 110W

What a terrible example. Sure you get to use opensource drivers but you pay the windows tax for that privilege...

[e8hffff]

Not to mention a windpad costs $600 O.o I mean seriously that is way out of the tablet sweetspot of $100-150

I agree. I don't have money problems but I refuse to pay $399+ for a tablet.