On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 12:40:28PM -0400, Alan Corey wrote: > I don't get it, so they just released the Pocket Beagle but it uses > old chips they couldn't sell and wanted to get rid of? A lot of what > I'm finding is a few years old. > > Paul said that's PowerVR, we wouldn't find anything. So that's the > PowerVR instruction set, just the GPU stuff with the shaders and such. > I haven't found a CPU instruction set but I haven't really looked, > maybe they're the same as other ARM chips? Somewhere I've got one of > those from a Pi
The CPU is a Cortex-A8. Totally standard and fully documented. That's not the issue at all. The issue is the lack of any documentation on the GPU that is part of the AM355x. > There's a page at http://www.ti.com/product/AM3358/technicaldocuments > I recently discovered. I've been looking at a sprs717j.pdf I got > somewhere else. It covers the AM335x Sitara line, looks like it was > originally written Oct 2011 but revised Apr 2016, this gif is page 8. > I thought from somewhere the chip in the Pocket Beagle is an AM3358. > The package it came in says AM335x (scans of card from package). A lot of arm chips have powervr graphics in them, with hence awful support for the video unless you are willing to put up with the proprietary drivers. As for why they used it, well the chip exists and is already used on the other beagleboard models so people are used to it. The AM335x has been around a while, this one just uses a new tiny package version of it with ram and lots of other bits integrated in a single package to make it smaller and cheaper. TI has been putting the same awful powervr design in their chips for years. The AM57xx has the same crap unfortunately, although the rest of the chip is quite a bit newer and nicer (Although I guess by now some people would think the Cortex-A15 is starting to get dated too). -- Len Sorensen
