I'm digging up this thread because with yesterday's announcement of the Raspberry Pi 4 that brings a whole new SoC from Broadcom, the BCM2711:
- 28nm
- 4-core Cortex A72 @1.5GHz (is there any other A72 implementation on 28nm?)
- 32bit single-channel LPDDR4 (assumed by me because there's only one off-chip memory module on the PCB)
- Videocore VI GPU @ 500MHz
- H265 4K60 video decoder
There are pretty much no details about the new GPU, except for clock speed and the fact that it runs OpenGL ES 3.0 (i.e. not Vulkan).
Is this the same Videocore IV GPU that was in the older SoCs but with higher frequency and a new video decoder block? AFAIK the Pi3 had a Videocore IV at 300MHz.
If so, it seems a bit problematic for the Raspberry Pi Foundation that the Videocore line was practically axed around 8 years ago yet they keep pushing the same 3D core on new SoCs.
The Pi Foundation claims they're putting the open source aspect of the GPU above all else, but does that really matter to the point of stagnating the 3D performance for so many years, as well as not supporting any GPGPU or machine learning APIs?
It still seems to be a fantastic SoC for light web-browsing, office work, home multimedia and development for education at an incredible price.