IVA is meant for that.

Yeah thanks I'm an idiot , right there on the page:

Nokia's excuse has been that it doesn't support the resolution very well, yet as some have pointed out, the Epson LCD conroller can do pixel-doubling; thus making the PowerVR on-die chipset able to output a resulution it DOES handle well and let the Epson controller handle the pixel-doubling to fill the screen.

Another selling point is power consumption versus all processing done on the ARM chipset solely. I cannot find it now, but within a PDF, if using both the MBX core and the IVA core in conjunction with the ARM portion of the 24x0 chipset, the power condumption was reduced by something like 60%. This is a strong selling point alone. Potentially double the running-time of the device just by having a driver that Nokia won't release? Why?

This has never been their excuse afaik. This is what some people assume (wrongly imho).

Yes, some hard figures would be useful to help in justifying why it would improve the tablet, and therefore look better for Nokia, sell more, etc.

Well, the MBX chipset whitepaper says it supports decoding up to 30FPS@VGA. All we need are 24FPS, but who knows if that is feasable. It's the Epson ship, I know.


[qupte]Yes, some hard figures would be useful to help in justifying why it would improve the tablet, and therefore look better for Nokia, sell more, etc.[/QUOTE]

Damn, I wish I could find that whitepaper now. I'll find it tomorrow when I'm not so tired. But It had significant power savings over using the ARM core itself. It was a bar graph, side by side in some PDF. Gah.

1. I don't want to start an rant or such thing.
2. English is not my native language, so I have to short my thoughts according to the words i know.

Why should Nokia work on better drivers or license the buggy ones?
There is no 3D GUI to make use of it, that could raise sales. Every action Nokia takes has to do with marketshare and profit. There may be others who think Nokia loves the Community and must be nice to the community. I don't think so. It's just a company that does its Job(people from Europe may have heard of "Bochum") in an oldschool capitalistic way.

The ONLY point that could persuade Nokia to work on the drivers would be, that it could raise sales. Why should it raise sales? The batterylife is already good enough no ordinary user cares about 3D games. There is no 3D GUI.

A company that does its job well has got a roadmap. Every device on that roadmap has to have its place and its time for sale. The N800 is already dead, the N810 is still in production, the Wimax Ed. has no new features besides Wimax. The devices already have a good marketshare because there is really no competition in that segment. Now imagine Nokia has got a N900 or whatever on that roadmap(it sure has, unless Nokia plans to let die the series). This new Device must be attractive to get new customers and may convince users of older devices to buy it, too.

There will be a point where reasons to buy a device will overlap and at that point it makes no sense to push devices that old any further, just let them die and go on with the new devices.

The problem is, we outside Nokia don't know where we stand. At what point is the roadmap. The whining about the drivers lasts so long by now, I don't think, that there will happen anything in that direction.

The community or a developer would have to say here is a supadupa application I will write or port or whatever and it will double your sales. Give me the drivers and I will do it! That won't happen. The IVA and MBX are just features nobody at Nokia considers important enough.

There will be the day when the N8x0 will be dropped, thats sure as the amen in church. The question is, will the community continue the work an let the devices live or will it just go on with the N900 or whatever? The chances that work will go on with N8x0 depends on what features have been implemented by then and how big the performance and feature gap between the old and the new is. Just start closing the imaginary gap NOW.

Get together every hacker, developer, hardware expert from the community, set up a project and start working on a wrapper, driver or whatever to utilise the abandoned features. If it is made with enough work on the public relation side of things it may attract other developers/hackers from outside the community as well. Nokia could at least have more respect towards the community then. Just stop talking about that driver licensing or whatever part that would be dependent on help from Nokia. Don't be naive.

Love the page though.
OT: Just noticed that the certificate for wiki.maemo.org expired yesterday...

Maybe you should ask xda-developers for tipps on how to extract files from a flash-file. The start would be to optain the right symbian driver files. Some people from the Pocket PC scene may have information too, like the people behind tcpmp/coreplayer and fpsece, because they optimized their software for the 2700g (MBX-lite).

The openpandora people may have information ,too. I think they have access to the drivers for the newer sgx. Maybe they can give hints without violating NDA, just tipps where to start.

I quite agree, we need to provide a compelling argument. The n8x0 is still for sale, so if some nice applications could be made using the 3D acceleration/IVA acceleration, that would be a reason.

A second reason is preparing for the future (next tablets), which will presumably contain 3D accel (for the reasons I said on the wiki, everyone else is doing it, it's expected, and it looks cool - cool sells IMHO).

Likewise, people really expect to be able to play multimedia files without conversion, the IVA may be a step in the right direction here.

Lastly, from Ti's and ImgTech's points of view, it would do their companies no harm to provide drivers to showcase their hardware. Just how much "profit" they gain from this vs. the "loss" associated with doing the deed is something I don't know.

They use the acceleration fns in the chip, not the PowerVR itself (at least the last time I looked at the available code).

Different OMAP, different PowerVR, I don't think we gain anything here. If we want to reverse it then we can just start from the omap2430 driver which we already have. This drive is currently about asking Nokia/Ti/ImgTech to provide an existing driver and convincing them why they should do so.