Quote:
Originally Posted by msundman
The OS is orthogonal to the issue. You probably meant to ask: "Isn't all of that done by software on more general purpose hardware?" That's a good question, and IMO that's what should have been done since the first prototypes. After the software is done and tested and devs have figured out which functions they need, and after profiling everything to see what takes most time when it matters most and what consumes most power in which usage scenarios, only then should you optimize your hardware. But epson probably thinks it's more important to create many revisions of those chips (for lots and lots of money, of course) than to help the devs working on them by making things better sooner.
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Perhaps you need to read this press release with a grain of "marketing salt" in mind.
It would be very beneficial if the controller supported arbitrary sub-area refreshes, and a few of those areas in parallel perhaps. For the first uses of e-Ink displays, it probably wasn't a big deal that you update the whole screen at once since you'd probably be displaying a whole new page anyway.
Since it turns out that people want to use the displays for popup menus and even typing or scribbling, having partial screen updates is the next logical thing to implement.
I noticed that in the iLiad displayManager there is an API for partial screen updates which is "not implemented", yet the scribble library offers "fast point updates" by directly talking to the driver. Perhaps some of the functionality is already in the current hardware.