Secret Herbs and Spices

So you want to learn more about how your PC actually works?. Perhaps you'd like to know more about the inside workings of your Intel or AMD processor. Well, that's no problem, of course. Hugely detailed technical datasheets are available from both these vendors. Sure, they are a bit reticent about some details - internal debugging registers, that sort of thing. But, for the most part, if you want to know what connects to each of the pins, what the instruction sets and registers do, and how the device works internally, all that information is available.

And so it is for most electronic devices. After all, how could engineers design without this information?. Or hobbyists learn the secrets of circuit design?.

Unless, of course, we're talking mobile device CPUs (and GPUs). Suddenly it's a world where, unless you are (as Nvidia state in their developer forum) 'considering a market for 100,000+ devices', then frankly, you're out in the cold. For some reason most of the mobile CPU vendors are incredibly secretive about the internal workings of their ARM-based SoC (System on Chip) devices.

Oddly, Texas Instruments appears to be the odd one out. They do make detailed technical reference guides available for their OMAP series of devices. I'm not quite clear what earth-shattering secrets the other vendors feel they can't disclose, but for open source developers this paranoid secrecy must be absolutely infuriating.

But if your device comes from Qualcomm or NVidia, forget it. Their device secrets are available only to a select few.

You can understand, perhaps, that these vendors hardly want to support hobbyists who want to tinker with their chips. But TI's relatively open approach has made it possible for a whole open source infrastructure to spring up around their chipsets, such as the Beagleboard. I think the other vendors are really missing an opportunity here. If they persist in their paranoia, in the long run, it's likely that the more open vendors will get the attention of the Open Sourcerors. Already, Canonical have made a real effort to support the ARM architecture, for example, but these attempts will founder on the proprietary extensions made to the architecture by each vendor, particularly if the technical details have to be reverse-engineered.

So, Qualcomm and NVidia. This is a plea to open up more. What secret herbs and spices do you really think your competitors don't know about, that are buried in your private datasheets?. Open up and let the innovators come knocking at your door. It's your market to lose, long term, if you don't, regardless of how many devices Samsung or HTC are buying off you right now. When the market matures you need to look for diversity, and that comes from smaller players, who may be considering integrating ARM and Android into all sorts of products, such as car dashboards, refrigerators, stereos.... who knows what. If they can't easily get technical data when they're doing a proof of concept, they'll go to the vendors who are willing to engage, and design around their products.

You can see this quite clearly in the embedded processor market, where Microchip made the PIC series of processors incredibly popular by actively encouraging hobbyist designers. No matter how technically amazing your products are, its a maturing market. Imagine if Intel and AMD kept their processor datasheets secret. Would we even have Linux or Android now?. I doubt it very much.