[ebenupton]

Less than you'd think. Other vendors have improved somewhat, but from often from pretty poor starting points. Jumping a process node is a "brute force" approach: we can all do that. I'm more interested in apples-to-apples comparisons on a given node.

[AceJohnny2]

Had you worked on it directly, or were working on other parts of the chip while at Broadcom? I've always been hoping to see some hard benchmarks. I had worked on a video codec IP for a competing (but defunct) chip, hence my curiosity :)

I'm curious about the technological history of the VideoCore. The wikipedia page [1] and Broadcom marketing page [2] don't give a lot of information to distinguish it from competing cores (such as ARM's own Mali or nVidia's Tegra line). In fact, the information I see makes it seems pretty run-of-the-mill tech of 5 years ago.

I guess I could RTFM now that it's available :D

Edit/afterthought: none of this really matters actually, as there is no other chip on the market with the BCM2835's capabilities and that is more open-sourced.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore [2] http://www.broadcom.com/products/technology/mobmm_videocore....

[ebenupton]

I did work on it directly. James (now working solely for Pi as HW director), Gordon (now working solely for Pi as SW director) and I (still working for Broadcom, and for Pi) were members of the VideoCore IV design team. James and I were responsible for the QPU (quad processor unit) design and implementation in the V3D block.

There's no one thing about V3D which makes it superior to other cores. Just lots of attention to detail at the design, RTL implementation and layout stages.