OpenCores is a really awesome project one that keeps growing in bounds all
the time. Another one is RISC-V http://riscv.org/, these guys have actually
made it to early manufacturing stages and have a fairly solid roadmap to
actually getting these things produced by late 2015.
Yeah PowerVR and Imagination technologies behind are one of the most stubborn
anti-free software companies around. The rest is just as bad as you pointed
out.
Powervr is horrible. The kernel driver is a GPL shim that doesn't do
anything important, and the important stuff is in a nonfree userspace
library. Nobody is working on reverse-engineering it, AFAIK. Imagination
technologies is not a free software friendly company.
I heard of the Lemote Yeeloong; that it used a MIPS processor, and that it
respects freedom. And I (wrongly?) associated MIPS with software freedom.
Is it up to the manufacturers to disclose hardware documentation? Just
because an architecture is free (is MIPS free?), implementation of
MIPS is a CPU architecture, and it's certainly not free and even has patents.
The only architecture that I know of that is actually free is OpenCores. But
that's just the hardware, and open hardware and free software are 2 different
things.
The issue with this one is that it uses a GPU
Does this have RYF potential?
http://store.imgtec.com/product/mips-creator-ci20/
