[bedoig]

First, I would love to see some progress on the video acceleration front.

That said, it seems strange that everyone fixates on the lack of drivers for the ATI chip. Personally, I don't buy into the argument that the physical presence of some piece of hardware in a chipset implies that it will be used in every production device. It seems that HTC and the courts are also of that opinion. Device performance does suck though (ok, it's not HORRIBLE, but could definetly be a lot better).

To my knowledge, the 6700 (and most other older devices) didn't have any kind of hardware video acceleration, and yet they performed significantly better than devices based on the new Qualcomm chipsets. The difference apparently lies solely with the processors. These 400mhz Qualcomms appear to perform much worse than the 416mhz Intel's from older devices. And the Qualcomm chip even has that second core that is supposed to handle phone/radio functions. Hopefully the new revisions in the upcoming HTC devices (7200a or something like that?) perform at least at the level of the old Intel chips. Maybe with the combination of the higher CPU clock speed and the video acceleration we'll see better performance.

Anyway, I'm not trying to call anyone out on talking about the video drivers or anything. I've done it plenty of times myself. It just seems that no one takes the crappy Qualcomm processors into consideration. I'll be waiting to see how the Diamond performs. Maybe it's time to jump ship for a while.

Edit: Sorry, that was way off topic. More on topic: it should in theory help a lot. It would allow the processor to offload most/all video related tasks. This would speed up everything from watching videos, to GPS nav program performance, to screen redraws (portrait to landscape, scrolling, etc). The processor wouldn't be loaded down with all that junk, and the device would perform better overall. There is no way of knowing just how much better without actually having it working though.