Am 29.09.2014 um 09:09 schrieb Richard Melville:
PS: And that's not all. About two years ago noone thought anyone
would be mad enough selling 32 bit EFI anymore (I've seen Apples
32 bit UEFI and some rather broken 32 bit UEFI implementations on
some ca. 2010 Asus notebooks/netbooks). But with Intels Clover
Trail Bay Trail architecture, many Notebooks, Netbooks, Tablets,
Convertibles hit the market where a 32 bit boot loader effectively
crippled 64 bit hardware. Why? When Intel acquired PowerVR, the
graphics core was thought for the use in smartphones and tablets.
AFAIK Intel has not "acquired PowerVR", it's owned by Imagination
Technologies where Intel has a stake. Intel has also made a statement
(thankfully) that future Atom SOCs will use its own graphics core.
Yes, that was very unprecise. Intel is (was?) Imagination Technologies
largest stakeholder. Was this a controlling stake? I dunno. At the end
of June Intel sold some 9% of IMG. Afterwards they announced using their
own graphics core in future tablet and convertible versions of the Atom
SoC. I think for mobile phone applications, the PowerVR graphics core
still offers a better ratio between power consumption and performance.
Atom SoCs with it's own graphics core like the Cherry Trail should
appear soon (for the holiday business), now sporting true 64 bit UEFI.
This still leaves us with millions of tablets with PowerVR and 32 bit
UEFI. For my work¹ the PowerVR graphics is not so much of a problem: For
live rescue systems the UEFI framebuffer suffices. To build really good
usable Linux distributions for those tablets a driver with at least
proper 2D performance would be needed.
Yours,
Mattias
¹A large part of my work is building live systems for maintenance and
rescue applications, like the one solde by German magazine Computer
Bild, the one sold by c't or the one by ECO ("Antibot DVD"). Most of
this systems are based on LessLinux (thus based on LFS). And I have to
care for good hardware support. A recent problem with many of the 1st
gen bay trail/clover trail tablets are failing eMMCs. They just weren't
made for constantly swappimg Windows. For this reason I care for this
obscure platforms.
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