[mazurnification]

I am fan of the Jeff Geerling Youtube series in which he is trying to make GPU (AMD/Nvidia) run on Raspbery Pi. It is not easy - and they have linux kernel source code available to modify. Now imagine all Qualcomm clients have to do similar stuff with their third party hardware, possibly with no access to source code of drivers. Then debug and fix for 3y all the bugs that pop up in the wild. What a nightmare.

Apple at least have full control on hardware stack (Qualcomm do not as they only sells chips to others).

[coder543]

Hardware drivers certainly can be annoying, but a hobbyist struggling to bring big GPUs’ hardware drivers to a random platform is not at all indicative of how hard it would be for a company with teams of engineers. If NVidia wanted their GPUs to work on Raspberry Pi, then it would already be done. It wouldn’t be an issue. But NVidia doesn’t care, because that’s not a real market for their GPUs.

Most OEMs don’t have much hardware secret sauce besides maybe cameras these days. The biggest OEMs probably have more hardware secret sauce, but they also should have correspondingly more software engineers who know how to write hardware drivers.

If Qualcomm moved their processors to RISC-V, then Qualcomm would certainly provide RISC-V drivers for their GPUs, their cellular modems, their image signal processors, etc. There would only be a little work required from Qualcomm’s clients (the phone OEMs) like making sure their fingerprint sensor has a RISC-V driver. And again, if Qualcomm were moving… it would be a sea change. Those fingerprint sensor manufacturers would absolutely ensure that they have a RISC-V driver available to the OEMs.

But, all of this is very hypothetical.

[wang_li]

> If NVidia wanted their GPUs to work on Raspberry Pi, then it would already be done. It wouldn’t be an issue. But NVidia doesn’t care, because that’s not a real market for their GPUs.

It's weird af that Geerling ignores nVidia. They have a line of ARM based SBCs with GPUs from Maxwell to Ampere. They have full software support for OpenGL, CUDA, and etc. For the price of an RPi 5 + discreet GPU, you can get a Jetson Orin Nano (8 GB RAM, 6 A78 ARM cores, 1024 Ampere cores.) All in a much better form factor than a Pi + PCIe hat and graphics card.

I get the fun of doing projects, but if what you're interested in is a working ARM based system with some level of GPU, it can be had right now without being "in the shop" twice a week with a science fair project.

[derstander]

> It's weird af that Geerling ignores nVidia.

“With the PCI Express slot ready to go, you need to choose a card to go into it. After a few years of testing various cards, our little group has settled on Polaris generation AMD graphics cards.

Why? Because they're new enough to use the open source amdgpu driver in the Linux kernel, and old enough the drivers and card details are pretty well known.

We had some success with older cards using the radeon driver, but that driver is older and the hardware is a bit outdated for any practical use with a Pi.

Nvidia hardware is right out, since outside of community nouveau drivers, Nvidia provides little in the way of open source code for the parts of their drivers we need to fix any quirks with the card on the Pi's PCI Express bus.”

Reference = https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/use-external-gpu-on-r...

I’m not in a position to evaluate his statement vs yours, but he’s clearly thought about it.

[wang_li]

I mean in terms of his quest for GPU + ARM. He's been futzing around with Pis and external GPUs and the entire time you've been able to buy a variety of SBCs from nVidia with first class software support.

[preisschild]

AFAIK the new SiFive dev board actually supports AMD discrete grsphics cards over PCIe