Yes, that certainly was helpful.

@jefro: Please stop dragging up Arm processors and confusing the OP. It's a GPU with bells & whistles, not a fully fledged Arm core in any sense of the word. A GPU is a very complex Digital to Analogue Converter. Arm are not the only people in the world to make processors, and processor cores. Ar Arm in this application would add a lot of weight and possess a lot of unnecessary features (e.g. 32/64 bit digital output). From there, you would still have to get red, green, blue, & luminance somehow :-o. Putting it briefly, if you had an Arm core in there, you would still need something like a CC1202 or other GPU after it to stream video.

ARM don't actually manufacture processors and GPUs, they only design them then license the designs to Qualcom, Nvidea, Apple, Samsung, whoever, who use the designs to build their own SoCs which may have added functionality included. They make their money from royalty payments.

The Op's CC1202 may well be some sort of modified ARM device with added bells and whistles. (ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machine)so it is a RISC processor.) He could try some sort of ARM specific distro but odds are, if it did work, it wouldn't handle any add on functionality within the chip.

My

Play Bonny!

So you feel that there is no processor in this box and it's just running a gpu???? I will point out the error in that logic.

I don't want an unnecessary debate on unknown hardware. It's networking, so there must be some digital core on something. Going on the only chip number we have, the CC1202 is a RISC GPU type object, which need not be capable of digital output. We can probably agree that the OP's chances of installing linux would be very low. That's before we get to where he would install it. How do you root a GPU to get away from the mask program?

I'm sure there's intelligence enough somewhere in the box to handle basic tasks. That's a long way from a linux capable box.

We all feel this exercise will be difficult to impossible.

I've been trying to decide on if a gpu back then could have been the major computing component. I can't answer that. It might be possible that some company designed some unknown device (and maybe OS) that somehow ran some basic tasks yet well below what we might consider able to run an OS.

If there is a way to root a GPU Google doesn't know about it. Looked for about an hour; didn't find anything as of yet:-

we would really need to know more about that software (can it be identified somehow? maybe it is android?) and why it is useless "now".

That says enough that we can figure this. They've hijacked the site to beg for cash, but this comes from my own browser cache That mentions it's a Jazz Media Processor. Taking the technobabble out of the above
Lines 1 & 2 are clearly parallel digital.
Lines 3-6 are serial devices usually digitally controlled. There is mention of a PCI bus, & a PCIE bus.
Lines 7 & 8 are formats AFAICT
Line 9 is clearly GPU output. Notably missing is any mention of a digital core. Clock speed is 350Mhz, whereas even in 2008/9 we would expect at least 1 Ghz from a digital core. Notice the DRAM speed.

I think we are all able to see that this is a GPU with some digital stuff going on. An SoC allows them to buy various cores, assemble the main building blocks of their circuit, add glue logic to make the thing work, and end up with a working product. I don't deny a digital core, merely assert that it is not significant in processing terms.

I also found the GPU.This One And Again and The end of Vivante

So we can say Vivante made GPU cores like Arm make CPU cores. Around 2009, C2 bought the Jazz media processor from Vivante. C2 Are no more, Vivante are bought over in 2015 (Often that happens to acquire the staff; Good GPU developers are rare). End of Story.

The price of this TV box was below 100$ 5 years ago. I have this one still working with XBMC.
I do not replace even battery in remote control, I will order soon a new one instead.

They appear to have popped up again. This link to the cc1200 family of processors

They work for me. Poring over the innards of a GPU of yesteryear won't get you anywhere. I doubt if you will get the digital core if there is ones, and there's

• No cpu instruction set
• No matching compiler we know of
• No libc
• No kernel version

Go back &read post #23. This thread should have died after that. But some folks keep hoping for the impossible.