Re:Nvidia prefers Windows CE over Android for netbooks
by wmf on Thursday June 18, 2009 @03:57PM
(#664031)
"all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code", which just plain incorrect.
NVidia is saying that on Tegra the rendering is done in software because NVidia hasn't written a Linux 3D driver. Clearly that isn't Android's fault. I wonder how many months or years it will take to get the driver written.
Re:Nvidia prefers Windows CE over Android for netbooks
by ajross on Thursday June 18, 2009 @05:43PM
(#664189)
The port of their windows Geforce driver to linux was reported to have taken a few months. As I understand it, they're still maintained from the same tree and share essentially all code but the minimum necessary glue (much to the annoyance of the linux kernel folks, it should be added).
Tegra is, no doubt, based on the same hardware components they're shipping in their other products; and its driver is surely similarly portable. This isn't a technical point, it's just FUD.
I counted only two technical points in the article. The first is that Android's icons are too big (?!). The second is that "all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code", which just plain incorrect.
Edit: I should probably elaborate. Android on the G1, at least, does video decoding using the Qualcomm DSP cores on the chip. 3D work has access to an ATI-based OpenGL ES 1.1 part, with relatively good texturing performance. The media frameworks are in C++, and available to native code. Only the UI library and top-level application framework is Java/Dalvik.