GTA04 SoC/CPU and LCD size

Harald Welte laforge at openmoko.org
Mon Oct 6 12:08:39 CEST 2008


Hi all.

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 09:10:25PM +0530, Pritam Ghanghas wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Tomasz Czapiewski <xeros at irc.pl> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I've been looking at the Samsung mobile CPUs/SoC list and then I've
> > searched the web for something simmilar/better...
> > And I've found OMAP 3530 which is used by BeagleBoard.
> > By reading the specification of the Samsung S3C6410
> > http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/productList.do?fmly_id=229
> > and TI OMAP 3530 http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/omap3530.html
> > I've got impression that OMAP application processor is a lot better
> > when it comes to the speed and architecture than
> > Samsung S3C6410 and it's already in production on BeagleBoard ( Linux
> > based minimal size board - www.beagleboard.org ).
> > Power consumption should be simmilar to Samsung SoC.
> >
> > Was it (TI OMAP 3530) already considered for GTA04 or not?
> > Could someone tell me why not use it in GTA04?

It was considered.  I generally tend to agree that the OMAP3x is a superior
product then the S3C64xx. (Cortex-A8 vs. ARM11, integrated DSP, more
sophisticated graphics, etc.

However, one of the important considerations in tightly embedded devices like
mobile phones (and the like) is the PCB footprint.  GTA01 still had discrete
SoC and discrete RAM and flash.  GTA02 was already using a multi-chip-package
that combines SoC, SDRAM and NAND flash in one package.  Samsungs 64xx is also
availabie in various multi-chip-package configurations.

To the best of my knowledge (and I'm not involved with GTA04 in any other way
than being one of the various people who proposed a spec) Ti doesn't offer
similar multi-chip packages.

> It would be great if they go for 3530. Anyway there will be a
> completely open source stuff out there. that wont be as good as
> imagination's proprietary. But still better than 6410. TI seems to be
> really serious about beagleboard.

Yes, Ti's OMAP department seems to be serious and actually has more
understanding of how FOSS works than Samsung.  Ti is e.g. running their own
linux-omap.git tree and tracking mainline, vs. Samsung still living in the 
dark ages of providing BSP's for stone-age kernel revisions without properly
merging mainline.

However, to me personally, the Imagination closed graphics is a show-stopper.

If they would at least document / open source the mode-setting, low-level init,
framebuffer and 2D bits, it would be better.  But Imagination appears as closed
as nVidia in the PC market.

However, I have received rumours that the driver architecture of Imagination is
actually only a thin binary-only HAL with an open source OpenGL-ES
implementation on top only a thin binary-only HAL with an open source OpenGL-ES
implementation on top.  If that is the truth, then there's hope that somebody
can reimplement that hal without much trouble.

However, I haven't yet seen the actual graphics drivers for Linux on OMAP3.

If anyone has pointers on this, I'd really appreciate it.

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>          	        http://openmoko.org/
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