Truth and Intel GMA500 Netbook
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The integrated GMA500 graphics accelerator, a constituent part of the Intel SCH US15 – known by the codename “Poulsbo” – dedicated to embedded applications, has made his first official appearance in the roadmap of the colossus of Santa Clara in April last year. Along with the Atom Silverthorne computing counterparts, the chipset would be the proposal’s reference to Intel MIDs and UMPCs, that is for all those small device that require aefficient and dall impronta reduced.
Surprisingly, however, this promising Poulsbo, and, more specifically, its video subsystem, it was something far more “revolutionary”: the integrated GMA500 graphics accelerator supports it not only vertex and pixel shaders 3.0, but also includes an engine graph dedicated to video decoding of H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC1 and WMV9 HD (1080i and 720p). While going out the limit of output resolution of 1366 x768 pixels, it is still very special characteristics, especially when considering the intended scope for this chipset (we are aware that this is not chip in a technical sense but rather a system controller hub, but in practice the two terms are common overlap).
The story of Poulsbo and its graphics chip, however, takes an unexpected turn when the platform designed for MIDs Intel is beginning to be used in some netbooks competing with another chipset Intel, the 945GSE (used in combination with the series Atom Nxx ” Diamondville is dedicated specifically for netbook and nettop). The reason behind the adoption of this solution in different fields from the original ones is being able to circumvent the limitations imposed bySame for the adoption of Intel chipsets and CPUs 945GSE Diamondville, particularly those concerning the size and resolution of screens, used in netbooks.
In fact, one of the first mini-notebook to use the platform Menlow (Intel Atom series Zxx coupled with the SCH US15) was the Dell Mini 12, featuring a display from 12 “to a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. In these circumstances, a direct comparison between the two solutions available from Intel ultra-mobileinevitable.
The crux of the issue was not only the computing power of CPU Silverthorne and Diamondville, two branches of the same architecture oriented to energy saving, but they will also discuss what advantages or disadvantages would lead the new GMA500 graphics chip than the “old” GMA950 integrated in most netbooks.
On paper, the GMA500 has some significant strengths, such as support for latest technologies and the ability to decode video streamsHD. US15W incarnation of Poulsbo (adopted in netbook) the graphics subsystem also has a clock frequency of 200 MHz compared to 133-166 MHz that is locked on the GMA950 chipset 945GSE. Everything suggests a clear superiority of the solution Menlow, at least in the graphic industry, but once again things did not go as expected.
Accomplice, perhaps adopting “forced” of Windows Vista on the first netbook Menlow (this time because of restrictions imposed by Microsoft for use in OEM licenses of Windows XP), the actual performance was below expectations. Although the whole system works on the whole less responsive, the most serious problems were noted in browsing web pages have developed (especially those with flash content) and video playback in high resolution. This withoutcounting problems using Aero interface together with the playback of movies, a practice that caused frequent system crashes and blue screens. Such limitations have sparked debate about the actual capacity of the GMA 500.
Even more serious problems involving Linux users. Penguins fans have had the opportunity in the years to strengthen their faith in place by Intel in open source, especially for supporthardware. Although not a completely isolated case, for now we can only say that the GMA500 is considered a bit ‘the exception of * nix support from Intel.
To better understand the reasons of the problems with this chip on Linux we must first recall that the GMA500 graphics accelerator is completely different from those made previously by the giant Santa Clara: The video system is in fact a variation of the PowerVR chip, licensed from ImaginationTechnologies and integrated into the System Controller Hub US15. The modular architecture of this solution has allowed Intel to take advantage of the PowerVR SGX 535 graphics core for 3D acceleration and the VXD HD video engine to decode video, complemented this 2D engine owner.
So this is a completely new architecture that requires a driver “ad-hoc”. One might then think that the problem is the lack of any driver that supports the GMA500, but it is not. In fact the aforementioned Dell Mini 12 has been proposed by the PC vendor Texan in many countries with both Windows Vista with Ubuntu Linux (version 8.04.1), then there was a kernel module. Given their experience in supporting PowerVR chips, writing drivers for Linux wasentrusted to Tungsten Graphics, drivers spin immediately included in the Ubuntu supported by Dell and Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
Up to this point does not seem to rise to complications. The problem in fact is not in the operation of this release of Ubuntu on Poulsbo, but the use of different distributions and / or more up to date. To better understand how this is possible, Adam Williamson of Red Hat has done extensive research and numerous tests on the driver arriving at conclusionsvery depressing: the dedicated driver xf86-video-psb had remained unchanged since its first official release (dated March 2008), and what there was was defined by our colleagues at Phoronix “A Bloody Mess”, literally “a terrible mess” . Moreover, the same driver depended on a firmware file called msvdx_fw.bin owner and an additional named driver Xorg Xpsb for 3D acceleration and video, all requirements apparently undocumented and difficult(if not impossible) to build on more recent versions of Linux Kernel 2.6.24.
Now something starts to move. Drivers working for openSUSE 11 and 11.1 have been made available due at the exit of the MSI Wind U115 and the possibility to buy it pre-installed with OpenSuse. The same Adam Williamson has managed to patch the original driver, making it compatible with the new release of Fedora is free from dependencies listed above. Theinstallation process is not automatic or painless, and more than one user has complained of problems and poor performance, but the direction is right. Also Jolicloud Ubuntu Netbook Remix and both have announced support for the GMA 500 in their next release.
Good news arrived for Windows users, who have little access to a driver update that Poulsbo has had many positive findings.
In conclusion note thatUS15 despite the chipset was designed by Intel’s MID segment / embedded, its adoption in the field of netbook is now an established fact, especially for those models that are a bit ‘borderline than the incarnation “canonical” mini-notebook. To date between these models are counted as the Sony Vaio P Series, MSI Wind U115 Hybrid, Dell Inspiron Mini 10, Acer Aspire One 751 and Asus Eee PC 1101HA and T91. The improvements experienced by many users withthe release of latest drivers for the GMA500 give hope that there is still work on site to resolve the last outstanding issues, and the recent denial of Intel about a possible detention to the availability of the Menlow platform for assemblers of netbooks is insurance plus the fact that the laptops equipped with these chips will not remain only “isolated experiments.
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