Imagination launches MIPS Creator CI20 development board

[HEXUS]

The 1.2GHz dual-core CPU, PowerVR SGX540 GPU, 1GB RAM, Wi-Fi, Bt4 machine costs £50.

Read more.

[3dcandy]

Big price hike from it's fruity competitor too....
However the specs are more to my liking in many many ways

[theleader]

You get what you want to pay for!

The PIE usually requires addons before use!

[directhex]

It's getting a hostile reception in Linux circles, due to its PowerVR graphics (PowerVR have a dreadful history RE Linux drivers)

[3dcandy]

You get what you want to pay for!

The PIE usually requires addons before use!

Indeed you do - horses for courses and all that

[DanceswithUnix]

It's getting a hostile reception in Linux circles, due to its PowerVR graphics (PowerVR have a dreadful history RE Linux drivers)

But isn't that just normal for graphics driver support under Linux for anything other than Nvidia? It seems pretty odd to me given the dominant computing platform of today is Android, but yet it seems to be the case. For example the recent news on Civ beyond earth:

"Though not official yet, it’s likely we’ll drop support for Intel and ATI graphics cards on Linux platforms prior to the game’s launch on Linux."

http://blog.gameagent.com/civilizati...-dev-update-6/

[DDY]

But isn't that just normal for graphics driver support under Linux for anything other than Nvidia? It seems pretty odd to me given the dominant computing platform of today is Android, but yet it seems to be the case. For example the recent news on Civ beyond earth:

"Though not official yet, it’s likely we’ll drop support for Intel and ATI graphics cards on Linux platforms prior to the game’s launch on Linux."

http://blog.gameagent.com/civilizati...-dev-update-6/

I think in this case, much of the poor reception is due to the closed source graphics drivers, this is a dev board after all.

[directhex]

But isn't that just normal for graphics driver support under Linux for anything other than Nvidia? It seems pretty odd to me given the dominant computing platform of today is Android, but yet it seems to be the case. For example the recent news on Civ beyond earth:

"Though not official yet, it’s likely we’ll drop support for Intel and ATI graphics cards on Linux platforms prior to the game’s launch on Linux."

http://blog.gameagent.com/civilizati...-dev-update-6/

Things are much much MUCH worse for embedded graphics than desktop graphics. You can't really compare the two.

On ATI or Intel, occasionally things suck.

On embedded not only do things *always* suck, but the (closed source) graphics drivers don't work on "normal" Linux kernels, only on heavily patched vendor kernels (e.g. Freescale's iMX6 patch set is around a million lines). And those vendor kernels are not kept up to date. So you need to pick - you can have graphics, OR you can have a 2-5 year old kernel with no hope for updates.

As a random example, Intel Bay Trail uses PowerVR graphics. The only supported Linux distro for it is Fedora 18 (released January 2013, discontinued January 2014)

[watercooled]

Bay Trail uses Ivy Bridge graphics AFAIK, with a VXD 392 video block from PowerVR for additional hardware codec support. Many other Atom chips, including the recent Merrifield and Moorefield use PowerVR though.