The GPU is still an ARM Mali T6xx which is mostly unsupported, i.e. removing Chrome OS and running "pure" linux is going to be dreadfully slow for lack of 2D/3D acceleration. It's a shame that ARM hasn't released any technical datasheets for their Mali GPUs.
It's not so bad to not have a GPU at all (though given that ARM owns Mali and you're licensing from ARM anyway, it seems prudent to have one if you can). The real problem is not being able to use the hardware that is there due to driver issues.
It's really not quite fair to describe videocore as a GPU, it's a proprietary SIMD DSP architecture with a really awesome 2D register file.
I've joked before that the arm core on the rpi is really just there for power management ... and considering its share of the transistor budget, that joke almost sounds credible.
They're also unveiling their new GPU architecture, Bifrost, that uses that same sort of SIMT structure that desktop cards have used for a few years with memory coherence with the application processors.
The C1 has a ARM Mali GPU, which is just as close as the rest of the GPUs available on ARM SoCs. The RPi GPU is the most open in that market in that it has some documentation and source code available.
The Tegra3 has an ARM CPU and (presumably) an Nvidia GPU. The announcement from ARM is about a new GPU in the MALI family. SoC designers are free to mix CPU and GPU from any vendors they choose. While ARM is currently by far the most popular CPU choice, their GPU is in a much weaker position although its share seems to be increasing.
It's based on a Fujitsu custom ARM, with 32GB HBM2 and 512b SIMD.
There have been a few discussions over the years.
I am not sure how such chips could replace GPU if there is a shortage of them as it's highly customized and fairly expensive to get the hand of them.
Nice! There aren't too many SoCs using the lower end a
ARM cores like A3x. Weird that they avoid mentioning the specifics of the GPU. I hope it's something with decent open-source drivers.
It has a VGA port and what seems to be a verrry modest video system. However, it also has two PCIe3 ×16s, so presumably you can use your own GPU, if the software support is there. There doesn't seem to be an integrated GPU in the AMD dev kit http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/s... either, so presumably there is Linux ARM PCI GPU support out there, unless everyone is just SSHing in?
Most linux desktops work fine on ARM chips FYI. GPUs in the ARM world are usually just for OpenGL used by video games.
Video decoding/encoding is handled by a VPU (not GPU), HDMI is handled by a separate HDMI PHY, and most of these components have mainline, libre kernel support if you use an Allwinner based single board computer.
Microsoft has started branding some Mali GPUs as DirectX 11 capable, though YMMV on using these features.
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