Palm has picked up another outside hire, this time poaching AMD’s engineering manager for Linux Core Engineering, Matthew Tippett. Matthew joined graphics chip-maker ATI in 2003 (ATI was purchased by processor-builder AMD in 2006) to build graphics drivers for Linux systems. But now he’s moving from Toronto, Canada to Sunnyvale, California to join Palm, heading up one of Palm’s Linux Kernel teams.
What could Palm want with a Linux engineer specializing in graphics chips? Well, there is that PowerVR SGX graphics chip sitting inside the Pre doing absolutely nothing, and webOS is at its core a Linux OS. We imagine that Matthew’s going to be kicking Palm’s webOS development on the graphics front into high gear - something that sorely needs to happen so that the processor can stop having to deal with the rendering and just deal with the thinking part of being a fancy smartphone.
Read: Phoronix, thanks to everybody who sent this in!
Comments
I think this is great news!! But I have heard of people using Linux that have *horrible* graphic driver support. Will that be the same with webOS?
Thats ridiculous. Desktop linux has better graphics support than BSD(generally) and yet Apple still manages to get their stuff working perfectly on the iPhone and on OSX. There is no reason whatsoever to expect that the chip will be less than perfect(other than the fact that Palm seems to have not even considered using it until 4 months after the device was released).
Also, there is almost no chance of this being used to actually render stuff in the OS itself. That would require a complete rewrite of the WebOS interface. This will only be used for games.
Sooo, the powerful graphics chip we have at hand has never been used?! Whhaaaa?! Didn't even know that. If they can offload some of those renderings from the CPU to the GPU, performance should be muuuuuhc, much faster, and no more gripes about sluggishness. The DROID's performance in the Engadget hand's on made me get angry over my phone's occasional sluggish behavior.
PALM FTW, I like their methodical thinking and execution. Let's just hope they don't fall too far from the pack, because I have GREAT Hopes for this OS.
No it wouldn't. WebOS uses DirectFB for the graphics interface and they recently released a version with OpenGL support. This guy's job could be to make that work correctly with the Pre's and Pixi's hardware and help other engineers with updating the OS layer that interfaces with DirectFB - not a complete rewrite. Hardware assisted line drawing, moving/transforming images, etc. would result in a nice UI boost.
It's about TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!! I've been waiting for the graphics card to be put to damn use and give the CPU a break from all the rendering!!! :)
This is GREAT news!!!!!!!!!! Can't wait to see what comes of it!!!
Hope has come back to me that the pre will be everything i thought it was going to be.
In 6 months or 6 years? If they don't move much, much faster (and spread to other networks), Android is going to eat Palm alive.
I would LOVE to see some kick-butt GPU usage, but as has been said over and over and over again: we are all waiting for more BASIC feature support first!
Looked up some info on the chip, looks decent...
http://www.imgtec.com/PowerVR/sgx.asp
that's my only and major disappointment with webos, CPU management. I hope this comes out real quick.
Yea true, but I like to have a couple games just to wast time when I'm waiting or something.
Screw Games!!, make this guy make WebOS smooth as silk and then Palm will be back on the playing field. I love games but I would make the sacrifice to have a fast, smooth app launching ability. PS3 and Xbox are for games!
+1000.... these are my exact thoughts and feelings. I want smooth, silky-flawless performance. I have no need or want for graphics-intense, console-based games, like a mobile Madden. Too many buttons to sacrifice for me, wont be the same. However, I will bow to a mobile Halo game, thats my SH*T! {Live > dellibedaboss, see me!}
Your choice of picture for this post is just mean and sadistic -- such a tease.
But I am happy to hear that we might finally get some use out of the graphics chip and speed up Web OS.
My only issue is you would think they would have gotten this squared away before release.
Agreed. Really late to the party on this one Palm. Here's hoping the guy can squeeze something solid before Flash hits the device.
Just in case you guys wanned to see what these chips can do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ToYOgP9f9U&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeEZq1-AH5I&feature=related
Okey before I Get to excited What exactly does this mean?
It means that this guy will help WebOS actually utilize the GPU that the Pre current isn't using at all. So that the CPU won't be processing graphics anymore and will likely give us more of a smooth experience and a future for actual decent gaming on the device.
It will mean we should see a PROPER api for games, and general webOS speeds should improve throughout.....Yay!!!
Palm needs to move quicker, they are falling behind. I've been tempted to get a Droid from verizon, but I still believe that palm can make it happen and bring all the features I want to WebOs, so I am holding for the pre. Their updates have been revolving on optimizing WebOs that's good but they aren't bringing more features to phone. I haven't heard of any feature coming other than Flash 10. Hope to see results soon.
What would using the GPU to render 2D widgets mean to power utilization? Would the increase in performance result in worse battery usage?
Think of it kind of like this. In Vista if you don't have an adequate graphics processing unit/Video card, you can't run things like Aero because it would bog the CPU down too much since you load all the graphics processing onto it.
Right now with the Pre, we have the GPU but its not being used so its like running Window's Vista's Aero system but with no GPU which just stresses our CPU more instead of letting it focus on processing raw bits of data (Cards namely) instead of both Graphics and Information.
As for the Linux drivers, Ati has always done great work with Linux drivers (I'm a member of the AMD forums since 2005 so I've known AMD/ATI history as with Nvidia (Who has shoddy Linux support) and Intel.
I simply can't wait for some results! Right now I'm sitting here wishing I had a Snapdrgaon in this Pre.
Might be good news, but it doesn't sound like he's necessarily going to be doing graphics work:
"At Palm, Matthew Tippett will be serving as the head of Linux kernel development with their Linux-based webOS smart-phone platform. "
I wish Id read your post first before excitedly posting! BUT still... we can hope?
This is probably the best news I have heard since purchasing the UK Pre. Assuming of course they give devs access to the GFX API as soon as possible.
Things can only get better?
yeah, making an dev-accessible 3d API is actually kind of hard work, so I don't expect to see that from this hire too soon. What I do expect is to see the general graphical processing of the OS (card opening, minimizing, rendering, transitions, etc ) offloaded properly to the GPU and making the phone the snappy sumbitch it should be. I can see that being a webOS 2.0 (or earlier, hopefully) feature.
Just keep in mind they need to implement the OpenGL ES library for access to the GPU, so that involves a fairly comprehensive API even for baseline use.
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