Raspberry Pi GPU goes open source!

[bloodline]

The raspberry pi team have been hinting at this for some time now. This is a massive win for both Broadcom (who have been able to shift millions of this old chip), and the open source community who now have a proper base platform

[bloodline]

still has binary blobs? I was hoping for some new classic Amiga graphics cards ( maybe even a1200).

The binary blobs are for the MPEG codecs, the GPU is actually opensource now. I'm reading through the register definitions now!

[bloodline]

Is this GPU available on other platforms?  A n X86 AROS machine for example?

It is actually a gfx chip, which happens to have a housekeeping CPU on it... If you wanted to build a gfx card with it you could... But it would be massively underpowered compared to the cheapest AMD or NVidia (or even Intel) offerings

[bloodline]

I'd considered getting one of these once, but then I realized that the most powerful MAME games they can pull off, are from the pre 16-bit era.  At least from what I've seen demonstrated thus far. Or am I missing something?

Anything that uses OpenGL ES will absolutely fly on the current linux build for the Raspberry Pi, but anything that needs X will crawl. This is because the drivers were closed source and X was unaccelerated. But now the gfx drivers are opensource, so hopefully someone will write accelerated X drivers