(10-18-2018, 12:28 PM)stizzo Wrote: Of course, I agree with you, regarding 32Bit and how Mediatek treats OEMs, charging for the release of a free license kernel (a Linux Kernel) and closing all source codes.
This company, for the way it behaves with the rules of a GPL and with the Ethics of the programmers and developers, in my opinion should fail instantly.
It should only sell SoC, nothing else.
Instead, in addition to the SoC, Mediatek is also paid salty for the release of a source code, a license that should, I repeat, be all free; a Linux Kernel.
As I think it, this company only thinks about its profits and this only makes me angry.
The Helio, are good SoC (P60 with Mali G72MP3, Oppo A3 for example), the PowerVR, despite a Mediatek, stubbornly implement them in clusters of a few cores (low performance, when compared with those of the competitors), are mature.
But removed this family, the rest makes throw up.
The problem, however, is not the performance, but the large fragmentation that has come to create because of a Mediatek, which I repeat, it makes you pay to leave a license of a source code, which should in theory be open to anyone.
The fault is not the OEMs in this matter, Mediatek have the main fault.
Serious OEMs exist, but they are few and have a lot of money. (and update their terminals)
In the end, there are the tons of criminals "OEMs", who sell their products at low cost and the unwitting citizen buys them and without his knowledge, with dozens of malware pre-installed on the terminal.
Other thing, the support that can provide a Qualcomm, with the Mediatek you can forget it.
PS: In all those Asian and non-Asian countries, Kirin is the way. (Kirin 710)
Honestly, none of this matches my experience - unless everything has changed in ~9 months or so.
Mediatek aren't really involved in the 32/64bit choice - they supply both BSPs to their customers, and they decide if the 64bit support is worth the extra flash space and memory usage. Naturally, as they're not really going for the high-end, and every penny counts there, they often don't bother. Especially as 64bit support doesn't seem well marketed in the chinese markets.
When I worked with mediatek parts, we just used the upstream android and chromeos kernels (like this: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/kernel/). They seemed to boot fine for us, some userspace HALs were binary blobs, so were a pain to use (or you just lived without those features, as when doing graphics development you rarely care about the compass or gps or similar
. One problem mediatek (and most east asian SoC manufacturers) had is they had a "just get it working now" mentality to software - so it integrated badly with the upstream ways of doing things, and caused painful integrations when trying to move other parts of the software stack forwards. Let alone the pain of trying to read and understand (and fix) their code. But they were getting better, some of which was due to the ChromeOS team putting their foot down and demanding linux upstream-quality code integrating with linux-upstream interfaces and methods.Similarly, powervr aren't forcing anyone to use the small, low cost (in terms of the price powervr charge for the design and the silicon area increasing production costs) GPUs. See the above comment about costs.
As for your last statement - I've had more issues as an end user with the mali GPU driver than PowerVR's (but half of that may be due to me fixing the issues I happened to stumble into
, and unless the G51 in the kirin 710 magically punches above the weight of the "higher end" cores in the same family, I'd be surprised if it could reliably run something as demanding as dolphin on even relatively light games.