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Snapdragon hardware multimedia support, possible?

Hi!
I've been trying to find any documentation on Snapdragon's DSP and hardware based video and audio decoders. So far, nothing. I'm just thinking if it would be possible to cook the support into custom ROM as it is quite ridiculous that decoding something like MP3 or AAC takes any CPU time at all, as according to Qualcomm's web site Snapdragon has hardware support for decoding MP3, AAC and H.264. I take it Qualcomm only provides the documentation to partners, as it is impossible to find?
Hopefully full support for hardware acceleration comes with WM7, if it can not implemented on 6.5. Should be doable with custom driver (in kernel mode) anyway by cooking, provided the documentation is leaked or something.
Mikko.

It's not possible to have the SnapDragon documentation because Qualcomm will never release it.
It's possible instead to have the missing SnapDragon drivers for Linux or I hope for Windows CE only when a QSD based smartbook that will have these drivers will be out.
With Windows Mobile 7 it's a whole new story, new CE7 kernel and support for all the new ARM instructions. I hope that we'll get that things and soon

kholk said:
It's not possible to have the SnapDragon documentation because Qualcomm will never release it.
It's possible instead to have the missing SnapDragon drivers for Linux or I hope for Windows CE only when a QSD based smartbook that will have these drivers will be out.
With Windows Mobile 7 it's a whole new story, new CE7 kernel and support for all the new ARM instructions. I hope that we'll get that things and soon
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That's a waste of potential, but we can only wait (or not? )

you Cant really expect qualcomm to release documents on its IP.
but it would be nice if they and htc worked together to release a dev sdk.
if they are serious about developing the platform then its a step they really do need to make.
if samsung can get a sdk out for the omnia ii then it seems sensible to think htc need to play catchup.. the chipset does have potential,and it appears qualcomm are becoming more dev friendly.
look at what southend have achieved with some decent support from QC..

documentation?
Qualcomm should be giving documentation to ISVs its just a matter of it falling in the wrong(or right) hands. In the meantime, Snapdragon uses ARM Cortex-A9 core and you can find more details here:
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARMCortex-A9_MPCore.html
Not sure if that includes DSP.

My acer s200 has support for H.263, H.264 out the box =]

Ca5c4d3 said:
Qualcomm should be giving documentation to ISVs its just a matter of it falling in the wrong(or right) hands. In the meantime, Snapdragon uses ARM Cortex-A9 core and you can find more details here:
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARMCortex-A9_MPCore.html
Not sure if that includes DSP.
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Snapdragon is Cortex A8 based and yes it does have DSP

mightymn said:
Snapdragon is Cortex A8 based and yes it does have DSP
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Do you know are the hardware multimedia decoders really silicon or SIMD/DSP based? From the QC's documentation you get the feeling they are ASIC stuff, but it might be marketing and in reality they are IP cores.
Mikko.

mikolas said:
Do you know are the hardware multimedia decoders really silicon or SIMD/DSP based? From the QC's documentation you get the feeling they are ASIC stuff, but it might be marketing and in reality they are IP cores.
Mikko.
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Nope, don't know that

AMD Joins Android

It was only a matter of time before AMD followed Nvidia's lead and finally jumped onto the Android bandwagon, as the company is now recruiting engineers to create chipset drivers for Android. According to unnamed sources, the nation's second largest CPU manufacturer is now looking to offer notebook and tablet partners chipset solutions supporting Google's popular mobile platform.
"The Linux Base Graphics team is looking for Android Driver Development engineers to help us evolve our driver stack for new platforms and in line with the development trends in the Android ecosystem," reads the job description. "Experience with video decode acceleration within the Android web browser or video player application would be an asset. Experience with webm and/or OpenMax would be a bonus."
The company confirmed its interest in Android during an interview back in mid-March. Neal Robison, senior director of content and application support at AMD, indicated that offering support for Google's mobile platform makes a lot of sense for the company. "That is something we will be investigating as we take our Fusion architecture [into new markets] and we are able to create versions of this architecture for lower power environments that would work quite well for, perhaps, a tablet using this operating system."
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Full article @ http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Brazos-Llano-APU-AMD-Fusion-Google-Android,12548.html
Funny because the other week I speculated this

Does AMD even have an ARM CPU? Or can Android run on x86?

It's good ATI will come to Android.

I just ordered a lot of ati gear. Great was my surprise to receive it in hp boxes. So basically hp is creating phones?

sargasso said:
I just ordered a lot of ati gear. Great was my surprise to receive it in hp boxes. So basically hp is creating phones?
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HP is WebOs but they aren't apart of AMD. They're just buyers of AMD/ATI products and embed them within their systems.

good news for us
hopefully this time they actually make the drivers open source
last time i purchased an AMD/ATI based Windows Phone, it was a disaster, no drivers, so the GPU was wasted

AllGamer said:
good news for us
hopefully this time they actually make the drivers open source
last time i purchased an AMD/ATI based Windows Phone, it was a disaster, no drivers, so the GPU was wasted
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blame it on Microsoft they'll have to release source to comply with android. Otherwise they will be in trouble.
Who knows? Nexus 4 could feature amd. Amd definitely have a lot of work to do to catch up to its competitors.
Sent from my Nexus S using Tapatalk

a company who open the specs to some of their products
imagine they open the specs to the CPU, GPU, Sound Processor, WiFi, radio.... you know the rest and a Google Experience device... maaan
I WANT!

mingkee said:
It's good ATI will come to Android.
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All the Qualcomm CPUs use Adreno GPUs, which is a rehashed ATI product. ATI used to own Imageon.

Hopefully this will lead to cheaper phones too....like the six core they have for like 200
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App

Intel also jumped on the bandwagon and is reportedly going to use its atom cpu.
Sent from my Xoom using XDA Premium App

[HoneyComb] NVIDIA's commitment towards continued support of hardware partners?

As it appears they have had either a change of heart or the community is large enough to have a voice..
Mar 16 2011 at 12:07 AM #1
UPDATE 13 APRIL 2011
A lot has been read into a very short post about a Tegra development kit. I'd like to clear up a few points.
First, nothing changes in what we’re delivering to the open source community or customers. NVIDIA will continue to post the Tegra kernel to kernel.org and publish our Android code to our public git servers. Additionally, we will continue to make our BSP (codecs, GPU driver etc) available to all our hardware partners. We will continue to do this and nothing about these processes has changed.
For our partners' Android devices, NVIDIA provides support until the hardware partner chooses to no longer support the device. So, for instance, NVIDIA will support the Xoom on all versions of Android Motorola requests until Motorola ceases to support the Xoom. The same goes for ViewSonic with the G-Tablet, Notion Ink with the Adam, Acer with the Iconia, LG with the Optimus 2X and so on.
In relation to my original reply, that was a response to a specific question about a Tegra 250 Development Kit. Given the confusion, we will work with owners of Tegra 250 Development Kits individually to determine their needs. The term "Harmony" is an internal codename for the Tegra 250 Development Kit. It is not a tablet reference design. Each shipping tablet is a custom design with varying hardware components and requires a custom OS image from the OEM who made the tablet.
Finally, while we cannot support or give out third party peripheral drivers or provide the Android 3.0 source before Google does, we do want to explore whether we can assist the open source ROM makers. We will be reaching out to them today.
UPDATE 12 APRIL 2011:
Sorry folks looks like I caused a bit of confusion. Since this is a developer forum my comments
were targeted at Tegra Honeycomb developers and for this we’d like to focus on Ventana. For shipping or production products, customers should contact the device makers directly for OS support plans. They are responsible for the OS shipping on their device.
In relation to our linux kernel git repository, NVIDIA will continue to provide full open-source support for all of our kernel components and will push more of that upstream over time.
ORIGINAL 16 MARCH 2011:
NVIDIA is only supporting the Ventana platform for android releases going forward. At the moment we have released Froyo and Gingerbread OS images for Ventana and will release Honeycomb after Google has done so.
Andrew Edelsten
Tegra Developer Relations
NVIDIA Corporation
SOURCE(s):
http://developer.nvidia.com/tegra/forum/honeycomb-harmony
http://notioninkhacks.com/index.php/2011/04/12/huge-problem-on-the-honeycomb-front/
http://conclave.notionink.com/showt...mb-on-Harmony-NVIDIA-s-Official-Stance&p=1281

(BUILD ATTENDEES) System Dump Please!

5000 of the attendees of the BUILD conference were given Sammy Tablets with Windows 8. This is most likely the only public source of the ARM version of Win 8. Please upload what you can, within legal limits...

That Samsung Tablet wasn't ARM-based I think.

Nope it is not arm
I would love an arm dump to get it on touhpad via making install.wim...

slimshady322 said:
That Samsung Tablet wasn't ARM-based I think.
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It was nVidia based. I'll post the article link in a sec.

Core i5, that was told at conference.

No its not
Its an intel i5 no arm on the Samsung model

daweiteh said:
It was nVidia based. I'll post the article link in a sec.
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Nvidia Tegra 2 and above are ARMv7+ Chips. All Nvidia does it put their name on it. But those are ARMv7 chips. This goes for all the current and future mobile devices. If they are using i5 Intel with the builtin Intel GPU then that's a different story and it's not Nvidia. It's Intel. As far as I know Nvidia's mobile devices are going to be entirely ARM based.
As a matter of fact even Intel uses ARM to a lesser degree with memory managment chips for example. Everyone uses ARM to be specific. There isn't really a chip manufacturer out there that does not deal with ARM Holdings in some form. I'm very interested in putting Windows 8 on ARM so I'm following these threads closely myself. I have yet to see the ARM build and being a dev for MS myself, I have been testing Windows 8, but when I have conference calls with Microsoft and I ask for ARM support, they are telling me the setup is not done yet most likely and the support just isn't ready for developers yet. Stay tuned for sure. It should be a higher build number than 8200 I think.
Sent from Atrix4G Mobile

RedLineJoes said:
Nvidia Tegra 2 and above are ARMv7+ Chips. All Nvidia does it put their name on it. But those are ARMv7 chips. This goes for all the current and future mobile devices. If they are using i5 Intel with the builtin Intel GPU then that's a different story and it's not Nvidia. It's Intel. As far as I know Nvidia's mobile devices are going to be entirely ARM based.
As a matter of fact even Intel uses ARM to a lesser degree with memory managment chips for example. Everyone uses ARM to be specific. There isn't really a chip manufacturer out there that does not deal with ARM Holdings in some form. I'm very interested in putting Windows 8 on ARM so I'm following these threads closely myself. I have yet to see the ARM build and being a dev for MS myself, I have been testing Windows 8, but when I have conference calls with Microsoft and I ask for ARM support, they are telling me the setup is not done yet most likely and the support just isn't ready for developers yet. Stay tuned for sure. It should be a higher build number than 8200 I think.
Sent from Atrix4G Mobile
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Nvidia makes the tegra line of arm socs as well as chipsets for x86 and gpus for pcs. lets try not to get their products confused. Nvidia does a lot more than just "put their name on it" They tape out the chip and add their gpu to it. It's a custom implementation of an arm chip based loosely around the "standard" that arm creates. The series 7 slate that was passed out at build is the same series 7 that is going on sale later this month with an i5 in it, it also uses intel graphics. It's x86 aka not arm. Because there is no standard off the shelf arm system I highly doubt they will release any sort of preview arm build. Most likely it will take many many system dumps and a lot of work to get arm windows 8 working fully on devices that did not ship with it.
---------- Post added at 01:10 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:54 PM ----------
Remember Texas Instruments and Qualcomm are also throwing their hats into the windows 8 ARM(s) race. Don't count them out. Likely each device will have a version of windows compiled specifically for it ala windows mobile. I just don't see any real way around that. Unless they give the different arm chips special drivers and build them all in - but that would make for less efficiency and a waste of storage and more complexity considering that no one is going to be putting a windows 8 dvd into their tablet to install the arm version ever ever ever. I'm thinking this will all be precompiled specifically for each device and it will likely lack certain features like device manager and complicated driver handling controls. This is going to be a pain in the ass.

It is not confusing because I was only speaking on Nvidia ARM SoCs, not anything else they do. Ye have little faith if you think Microsoft can't bring a mutli kernalized version of Windows 8 to market for all the different platforms similar to what Linux/Android already does.
The big buzz about Windows 8 when we first started talking about it with Microsoft was "kernalized versions with ARM support". That's right from the horses mouth. I sure hope they deliver on that more than anything else. And seeing as how I help make the OS what it is, i'll be testing the functionality eventually. Due to NDA you aren't allowed to say much about it though until these types of releases become available to the general public and developers. Then we can discuss what works and what doesn't with the people who plan to actually use it and make applications for it.
Sent from Atrix4G Mobile

Qualcomm Releases Adreno 2xx GPU Binaries for on ICS ARMv6 Devices

Look at here!
Not too long ago, we shared fantastic news that Qualcomm had released the Adreno 2xx GPU Binaries for Ice Cream Sandwich. However one thing that we failed to consider was that these precompiled GPU binaries were compatible only with ARMv7 devices.
Sadly, this left many users with older and less powerful ARMv6 devices out in the cold. Due to having less powerful CPUs, these are devices that could stand to benefit greatly from full GPU hardware acceleration in ICS. Not content with sitting idly by, XDA Forum Member sweetnsour quickly saw fit to create a global petition asking Qualcomm to compile and release the necessary Adreno 2xx GPU binaries to get ARMv6 devices up to speed with ICS back on March 17th.
Less than two weeks later, and thanks largely to sweetnsour’s petition efforts, Qualcomm Senior Staff Engineer Dave Astle—otherwise known as XDA Forum Member myopicrhino—lets us know that Qualcomm has shared the goods with the development community. In other words, we now have the proper Adreno 2xx GPU binaries for ICS on ARMv6 devices.
In the words of the Qualcomm Forum Master:
In order to provide enthusiasts with recent improvements made to Snapdragon’s Adreno graphics driver for the 7×27 based on the ARMv6 ISA, Qualcomm has posted the updated Adreno 200 graphics driver binaries here. It has been tested with the Ice Cream Sandwich CAF release M8960AAAAANLYA1030, but Qualcomm is providing these driver binaries “as is” to those of you who have requested them.
Official Release Information:
This release contains the user-mode driver binaries for Qualcomm’s Adreno 2xx GPU on Google Android Ice Cream Sandwich for ARMv6 based chipsets. It has been tested with the CAF release M8960AAAAANLYA1030. Supports any Adreno 2xx GPU on Android ICS using the ARMv6 chipset (7×27). Google’s libRS (LLVM) does not currently support ARMv6.
Well there you have it, folks. Score this as another big win for the development community. And just as before, we would like to extend our gratitude for Qualcomm for playing nicely with the enthusiast / development community. ARMv6 developers looking to get cracking with the new GPU binaries can find what they’re looking for in Qualcomm’s Mobile Gaming and Graphics page or from myopicrhino’s post.
Qualcomm, thank you for once again showing that you care about your users and the Android development community.
[Huge thanks to myopicrhino for the tip!]
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I'm just distribute this news... If this topic has already been disscussed by another people, sorry me and close this thread. Thank you..
Hope developer see this...

Yep . Already dude