Funny you mention this, as I am actively involved in trying to corner HTC into coughing up drivers for the AMD Imageon 2300 chipset integrated on-die with the QualComm MSM7x00 chipset. I call them every day for my touch. The part about it is, I use Sprint and I will raise holy hell if they don't give me what was advertised or something that does what HTC promised in the first place. I plan on doing the same when the N810 WiMax Edition comes out.

The matter of the fact is that HTC doesn't want to pay the licensing fees for the drivers. There is no technical limitation, as the Touch Diamond actually has customized Imageon drivers and they can handle a VGA screen and TouchFLO 3D on a VGA screen as opposed to an almost identical chipset driving a QVGA screen.

They learned that people aren't stupid and they know what their devices are capable of and want what they paid their hard-earned cash for. Verizon found this out when they tried to hinder Bluetooth support on devices and caught hell from their subscribers and the law for knowingly restricting functionality.

If Nokia were smart, they'd just eat some crow and pay the nominal fee, whatever it may be for the PowerVR graphics built in. I wonder if they realize that Sprint is a memeber of the Open Handset Alliance and people already have Android on their phones with working 3D drivers. In fact, I have it on my Touch. If nokia is unwilling to provide drivers in an Maemo, there is always Android which will inevitably include the missing drivers for the DSP and OGL ES capabilities Nokia refuses to include.

It is kind of like how Nokia refuses to provide JVM for Maemo, but you can bet that either Sprint or Sun will provide that, otherwise...Android is there to do what Nokia won't.

If I were Nokia, I'd include the drivers and ask PowerVR (c'mon, these are the guys who perfected tile-based rendering) to develop or open-source the drivers. Either way, competition wins, whether bull-headed devs want to release software for something or not. Another thing is that Intel's new MID platform uses PowerVR technology as well and guess who is the big pusher of WiMax? Right.

Just give us the drivers and stop treating us like children, Nokia. We'll either optimize them to work better or just simply say "hmm...well, you're right, it just can't handle the rendering requirements," but something is better than nothing.

Or you might just have a class-action on your hands like HTC is on the verge of with all the disgruntled MSM7x00 chipset-based phone holders like me. Come to think of it, just to make you think, I'll register a domain to rattle your cage and bring unwanted attention and questions from superiors and partners why you are being so un-cooperative. I'll get in touch with the owner of htcclassaction.org for a little synergy action.

Yeah, I have a problem with authority, especially developers who think they are always right and their opinions are the only ones who matter.

And the resolution excuse....paska puheta, for all you in Tampere in Espoo. You know damn well it's a canned pacification response.

They will never be opensource, ImgTech would loose their IP.

I don't know what the expense is to develop new drivers (to get ImgTech to do so), but they may even be happy with what they provide, if Nokia aren't, there's not much that can be done.

Oh, I forgot to say one thing; this behavior is what a 'forced upgrade' means.

Well, at the very least, they could put their IP into a binary blob and provide the community the documentation to work out the rest.

This s similar to what Intel, nVidia, and AMD do, as well as other companies who provide some Open Source support.

No. We know quite well it is a real, but overcomeable, obstacle.

It's a genuine hardware issue; do you think they selected a larger resolution just so they could spend extra money on the screen and the Epson controller, and cripple full-resolution video playback framerate, just to have a response when people demand they license drivers?!

That's what people who sell standalone GPUs do.

Note that this is a different issue, because it's part of an SoC... Not saying they shouldn't, just that you're drawing a false similarity here.

Yes, absolutely overcomable: see liqbase for example.

No, the analog here is a computer with a motherboard which has onboard graphics chip features but having to buy a dedicated graphics card because I can't use the onboard one (different to the usual performance reasons).

I don't know of a single example where this occurs for any of the major manufacturers.

Does liqbase use powervr? I thought it was all software-rendering, just YUV to duck the bandwidth issue, and nothing to do with the 640x480 support, which prevents the PowerVR from rendering directly to the video framebuffer.

If I'm wrong here, then I'm even more interested in liqbase, which is currently on my list of things to look at once I get all my OSes running (currently 3.5/5; only bringing Debian up-to-date, and installing Android left...)

Benson,

Its all software, but as you know the architecture of the machine requires sending data from a main memory framebuffer to the LCD, and the "normal" display interface out of the OMAP2420 is not wired up.

It does not matter what hardware actually fills that main memory framebuffer before it is sent, so at the moment I use the CPU.
In future I hope to use other weapons at our disposal, that includes the built in PowerVR, the built in IVA or even the DSP.

I was merely pointing out that 800*480 25fps graphics are possible (and lower resolutions have even higher framerates) and that liqbase allows you to see the performance at various resolutions easily.

There is no limitation here. As I said earlier there is a working driver. Taking into account the closedness of the Linux driver and its messiness, Nokia are unwilling to release it as it's not stable = bad publicity (that's my take on what we discussed anyway).

I had hoped that developers would be able to obtain this buggy driver after signing a "we know that it will make everything crash but we still want it, please" disclaimer, but it appears this will probably not happen. I don't know why.

Some Nokia phones have the same Chip and have the drivers for it on the device. Why are they included if they are buggy? It seems like a bad excuse to me...