There’s one thing that always happens at bar camps; people talk. They talk with a passion and if you listen carefully you can always pick up a few little tasty morsels of information.

At the Mobile Dev Camp in Munich today it was no different. Apart from some excellent talks that I’ll write about over at MIDMoves (I had my MIDmoves hat on today) I picked up the following bits of info.

Moorestown /Moblin graphics performance (video below)

I saw a nice demo which made me think that yes, that GMA500 that annoys so many people on the Menlow platform, will be a whole lot better under Moblin and Moorestown and might even work in Menlow. The demo was a MSI Wind U115 playing a Quake III demo in the Moblin OS. 35 fps on an external monitor isn’t bad at all! Apparently the drivers are the latest (under NDA) and were back-ported to work with Menlow. The software engineer ensured me that Moorestown would be better. He also assured me that the core was PowerVR in a GMA500. That’s two software engineers that have confirmed that now. Seeing Moorestown graphic drivers working in Menlow kind of proves it too!

What clock for Moorestown?

More of an engineers hunch than something set in stone was the thought that Moorestown would run up to 1.2Ghz. Actually I see no reason why it can’t go higher over time as long as the devices thermal characteristics allow it. When you think about the processing range that Moorestown could cover you’re looking at something that starts at the current high-end of smartphones and goes up, in multi-threaded form, to at least twice the processing power.

Intel Atom Developer Program.

IADP will launch very early next year. That’s earlier than I thought but the earlier the better because the momentum for the Android and iPhone ecosystem is huge.

HTML5.

HTML5 is exciting. Flash is exciting too but both of these software technologies are going to put more load on your CPU. On mobile devices, that means trouble. Either the battery drains faster or the page loading slows down. You can turn Flash off but I hope you can turn HTML5 support off too otherwise the battery problem on mobile devices just gets worse.

No news on GPU for PineView.

I tried to squeeze out the details from a few people but no-one knew. Is it the GMA 3150 or the GMA500 as I predicted? The jury is still out on that one.

One of the things I expected to find out at the Intel Developer Forum this year were details about Pinetrail and Moorestown graphics. GMA950 on the current netbook platform clearly needs a boost in the video codec department and if Moblin 2 is only going to support Moorestown and Pinetrail along with the current generation of netbooks, it makes sense that they have the same graphics core right? It fits perfectly with Intel’s ‘continuum’ of devices on the Atom platform. Unfortunately the information on the graphics was limited to notes about OpenGL 2.0 ES and a mention of a PowerVR core in a ‘Sodaville’ Atom-based media processor presentation (image right.)

During a session at IDF this week though, I had fairly concrete confirmation from people in-the-know that the graphics on the Moorestown platform would be a GMA500 (PowerVR SGX core) as you’ll find in the Menlow (Poulsbo chipset as seen on the Asus T91, Viliv X70 and other mobile and long battery-life-focused solutions.) I was a little surprised that it’s the GMA500 but have no reason to disbelieve the info I was given.

Dovetailing nicely with that information though is continuing speculation that Pineview, the CPU+GPU on the Pinetrail netbook platform is also going to use the GMA500. The original info comes from a June article by HKEPC but LinuxDevices seem fairly confident that it is in fact a GMA500 core in Pinetrail.

Its looking like we’re going to have a very closely-matched range of platforms come mid-2010 then.

• Pinetrail – Netbook platform. Atom 1.66Ghz + GMA500 GPU
• Menlow – MID platform. Atom ranging from 800Mhz-2.0Ghz + GMA 500 GPU (with PowerVR SGX core)
• Moorestown – Atom CPU (clockrate unknown) + GMA 500 GPU (With PowerVR SGX core)
• Sodaville – Atom  CPU + PowerVR SGX core.

Note: In each case the graphics may be clocked at different speeds ranging from 133 – 400Mhz. On current devices we see a 133Mhz graphics clock.

The exciting thing about this is that everything is aligned well to keep it simple for developers and there’s just one operating system that will sit on top of all these to provide optimised kernel, drivers, SDK and app-store. Moblin. From smartphones to netbooks through set-top boxes, PNDs, PMPs, Web tablets and more. One platform for developers that covers, in the 2010-2012 timeframe, an addressable market of over 400 million units, in just the mobile internet device and smartphone segment. Add a few hundred million on top of that for netbooks!

Intel’s ‘Continuum’ is starting to come together.

Many of you are aware that the graphics performance on the GMA500 GPU included in the Pouslbo chipset, part of the Menlow platform used in most UMPCs, Intel MIDs and even some netbooks like the ASUS T91, is not a great graphics workhorse. 3G graphics performance (from the PowerVR architecture) is extremely poor and under Windows XP, the hardware accelerated video playback capability is left unused by most programs.

Intel have just relased production version 3.0.2.32 (6.14.11.1012) of the GMA500 driver to developers and as you’d expect, many people are hoping it will unleash some hidden potential. I’m one of those people and when I heard the news I immediately grabbed the Viliv X70 and downloaded the drivers.

Yes, there’s some improvement. A measured 5x improvement in DirectDraw 2D graphics performance on the Viliv X70

Old and New GMA500 drivers. Note the D2D scores.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really translate to anything interesting for your daily UMPC usage as far as I can tell. I’ve done side by side tests with standard apps and YouTube and can’t see any differences. Full-screen HQ is, in most cases, not as smooth as it should be. I couldn’t see any differences with Google Earth either (DirectX mode.)  The release notes list a lot of fixes and I certainly can’t see any down-side to installing the drivers so go ahead, do some testing and let us know what you think.

Intel GMA500 driver download page.

Somehow, somewhere, there seems to be a problem getting quality Linux drivers out for Poulsbo’s GPU. First we hear about the delays with Moblin V2 on MIDs  and now we get this story from an experienced Linux contributor. Adam’s article explains problems with the source code and how difficult it is to get working in a new distribution. Clearly the work on the Poulsbo drivers for Linux is delayed.

Building your own distro is exactly what Moblin is all about. 12 linux distributors have signed up to use Moblin  but if they can’t work with the Poulsbo chipset there’s little hope for any Linux distro on MIDs and Z-series netbooks in the near future. Let’s hope that Intel are working hard behind the scenes and that clean, usable GMA500 drivers will be available soon

AdamW on Linux and more » Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo) graphics on Linux: a precise and comprehensive summary as to why you’re screwed.