Qualcomm seems to be working on Snapdragon-soc with faster PC clock speeds – Computer – News

That has very little to do with ARM as an instruction set or platform; but since the GPUs are on the same SoC as the ARM instruction set CPUs I understand the association.

Since NVidia doesn’t provide decent open source drivers, are we going to say x86 is a bad platform? Oh no? Then we blame NVidia neatly and rightfully, and buy an AMD or Intel GPU.

Regarding the ARM platform, there are quite a few GPU choices:
-Qualcomm Adreno,
-Imagination Technologies PowerVR (IMG),
-Apple’s IMG cut and paste work, which was copied from IMG in such a way that they now pay neat license money for it to IMG,
-ARM Mali,
-Live,
-Broadcom Videocore.

Unfortunately, in this case, Broadcom is the only vendor to provide open source drivers; ARM Mali is also a closed platform, and you can blame ARM for that.

Since the Apple CPUs are made under license from Imagination, and Imagination itself keeps the drivers closed, I wouldn’t put my hopes on it becoming open source.

Fortunately, AMD GPUs are coming to ARM, at least to Samsung Exynos. Who knows, maybe even to Apple SoCs. And Intel is also going to make separate GPUs, so there is still hope. But you should not be at Qualcomm unfortunately; this 8cx Plus is not going to change that much, I am afraid.

Then what? Massive pressure from the customers. In the beginning the GPU driver of the Raspberry Pi was also closed, I just read on Wikipedia, and under a lot of pressure it became open source in 2014.

Intel Linux drivers were usually quite mediocre, and after a lot of bad publicity, Intel invested a lot in it and improved it a lot.

So just shame all bad companies with the right name (unfortunately most at ARM SoCs), and keep asking for open source drivers!

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