
A few weeks ago, I published a status article about a few SoC GPU drivers. SoC GPUs are a very hot topic that deserves a prominent exposition (even more than desktop GPU drivers in my humble opinion).
The current crop of SoC already provide unbelievable power to game developers and GPU lovers - and the versions that are coming are even more powerful[1]. In a few years they will be able to compete with traditional desktop GPUs on the laptop market. As they become more and more powerful there is good chance that they will be able to compete with them in the desktop world as well. In the same time, the traditional AMD or NVIDIA desktop GPUs will have a hard time to remove them from the mobile market as these SoC GPUs are both powerful and energy efficient.
There is a good chance that SoC GPUs will take over the world in the coming years[2]. That's part of the reason why I believe that the new series of open source GPU driver is of the utmost importance. And that's why I contacted several driver/tool maintainers/contributors:
- Connor Abbot (CA) - Open GPU Tools (Connor works on lima support here)
- Eric Faye-Lund (EF) - grate (for Tegra GPUs)
- Herman H. Hermitage (HH) - Videocore (for Broadcom GPUs)
- Luc Verhaegen (LV) - lima (for MALI GPUs)utter
- Matthias Gottschlag (MG) - Videocore (for Broadcom GPUs)
- Rob Clark (RC) - freedreno (for Adreno GPUs)
- Thierry Reding (TR) - grate (for Tegra GPUs)
- Scott Mansell (SM) - Videocore (for Broadcom GPUs)
- Wladimir J. van der Laan (WL) - etna_viv (for Vivante GPUs)
The good news is that they were kind enough to answer my rude and pitiful requests over the course of several weeks (the interview process started on March the 14th and ended on April the 20th). I'd like to thank them all for allowing me to steal their valuable time.
Updated with an up-to-date answer from Rob Clark (see below). Please note that you loading might be slow. This is due to the fact that you are a lot to read this article (thank you for that) and unfortunately the web server doesn't scale well (sorry for that).


