Great news today! Broadcom has decided to release as open source the graphics portion (VideoCore IV) of their BCM21553 SoC.<\/p>\n
This is part of the tech used in the Raspberry Pi, which currently needs a large closed-source binary blob loaded to make everything work. While it doesn’t cover all the functionality the chip provides, it’s a fantastic step forward and provides a great opportunity for improving the integration, transparency and performance of RPi systems in the future. Also, it means you no longer need to purchase a license separately to get access to various features and performance.<\/p>\n
Here is the post from Broadcom<\/a> on the source release. Here’s the post from Raspberry Pi<\/a> on their “birthday present.”<\/p>\n RPi is also offering a bounty for the first person who can successfully complete a challenge of running Quake III at a reasonable frame rate using the open source driver. See their post for more details on that.<\/p>\n Personally, I’m more excited about the possibilities that may open up for faster video transcoding and playing with GPU-boosted computation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Great news today! Broadcom has decided to release as open source the graphics portion (VideoCore IV) of their BCM21553 SoC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[23,22],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":482,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions\/482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}