On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 5:54 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
Joining the discussion late and breaking the threading... ;-)
join the looong club, it's not entirely um without precedent here ...
P.S. I just realised that this could have been another complete article. Sorry to make it a long message for this list! :-)
we liike long messages :)
P.P.S. For those who haven't read it yet, Bunnie's MediaTek reverse- engineering article [4] below is long but interesting reading. You've got to admire Bunnie's determination!
yehhhh, been there - at some point you just have to take a step back and ask yourself, "is this *really* worth it? what could i better achieve - what goal could i set - that has a higher bang-per-buck ratio for my effort-to-result" and you start to advocate the same things as libv, such as "for goodness sake stay away from powervr".
no the problem with mediatek is that they are actually *really low cost*. price-wise they truly have the market.
and in the phone market, it is made even worse by the fact that FCC certification is *directly* incompatible with the goals of the FSF for these "hybrid" SoCs, where there is access to the GSM/3G/LTE radio from the memory of the main SoC. remember: each variant of the firmware-hardware combination requires re-certification. that's $USD 50,000 *each time you upgrade the OS!*.
back in 2004 someone reverse-engineered one of the low-cost HTC smartphones which has a hybrid SoC with its GSM/3G baseband sharing the same memory as the SoC. it was discovered that you could change the power output of the GSM Transmitter simply by changing the contents of a memory address. from WinCE! it wasn't even protected, so even a standard WinCE application or virus could do it! and that's just damn dangerous.... *but* it's low-cost.
so for FSF Endorsebility you need to have a *separate* 3G/GSM/LTE chipset - entirely separate - which means it now needs USB2 connectivity (to the main SoC), but the firmware is complex these days (AT command set for a start) so you need a general-purpose SoC *in the Radio Chipset*, and you also need quite a bit of RAM (separate RAM ICs), *and* you need NAND/NOR Flash to store the firmware: all that means extra cost.
so you now have an additional $USD 12 for a GSM/EDGE phone and an additional $USD 30 or so for a 3G one in the BOM if you want to go the properly ethical upgradeable route, because you can, if you do that, use any general-purpose SoC available on the market: allwinner, TI, Freescale - anything.
l.
[1] http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=168 [2] http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops- in-brutally-honest-burnin/ [3] http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=835 [4] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
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