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by marcan_42 1762 days ago
You do realize the same person working on the Panfrost driver is working on Asahi, right?

We aren't a bunch of random people; we've been in this game for years. I think we have a better idea about the development effort required, likely timelines, and what project structure works than Larabel, who runs a blog.

As I said, we already have the userspace graphics stack passing a big chunk of basic test suites. We're already a good part of the way to getting this to work, in ~8 months including all of the hardware bring-up, not just GPU.
1 comments
AshamedCaptain 1762 days ago
Yes, and the infrastructure(Mesa, LLVM) and the like is much better, or at least much better than during the PowerVR MBX days, almost 20 years ago, when I was in the game. I have no doubt that something is going to come out of this. But really, are you going to claim that you have the people to make a RE driver on the level of, say, the Intel one?

For someone who is complaining about "sleep issues", I'm quite sure he is not understanding how different the situation is going to look.

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marcan_42 1762 days ago
Considering the Intel driver can't even manage tear-free display on some of my machines... Yes, I am.

It helps that we only have to support one hardware platform at this time, not a whole line-up of legacy cards, and that as far as we've seen so far, Apple's hardware design is much cleaner than the competition.

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AshamedCaptain 1762 days ago
> Apple's hardware design is much cleaner than the competition.

So the "planets are aligned differently", this time. Well, we'll see. I have my doubts since my impression is that Apple looted Imgtech for their GPU, and everything I remember about Imgtech/PVR is a complete disaster.

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marcan_42 1762 days ago
I don't know exactly how much of Imgtech is still in these GPUs, but the coprocessor/firmware interface is Apple's own design, the AGX2 shaders are a completely new design, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple only keep paying Imgtech because they have patents on TBDR, and there is otherwise none of their IP involved any more.
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AshamedCaptain 1762 days ago
When I say looted I mean "most of the people I knew who used to work in Imgtech now work at Apple", not any licensing agreement, which I would guess they keep just to avoid a nasty lawsuit.
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