On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Rogelio Serrano wrote:
On 2004-10-25 04:10:30 +0800 Vladimir Dergachev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
If there weren't all those patents out there we might just try to
develop a free graphics chip.
I have thought about this (repeatedly - the idea gets very tempting after asking for the docs for the Nth time) and I don't think it is feasible to make an actual chip. By the time we are finished the world will move on.
What could work, however, is to make a *board* that is capable of decent 3d. Put lots of memory, lots of bandwidth and several DSP to approximate the same level of raw floating-point power as 3d GPUs. Leave everything else to the software.
The problem is getting such a beast under $1000 range. Last time I looked TI DSPs that were up to the task were rather expensive.
best
Vladimir Dergachev[snipped...]
This was discussed in lkml a few days ago. A hardware company is considering building an open fpga based video card. Although the target is mainly 2d accel its a good start. There was a lot of discussion about off screen rendering and support for the new compositing model in xorg. You can see that thread posted on kerneltrap.
I was aware of that. However, the proposition was by a company that is known for its 2d video cards (used for air control for example), so I was
talking something a bit different - just have a DSP add-on board powerful enough to do decent 3d.
Programming DSP is a lot easier than FPGA, the code is more portable, and,
besides, there are no FPGAs at the moment that can possibly compete with ASICs that are produced by ATI or NVidia. On the other hand with the movement to programmable everything conventional GPUs are slowly turning into DSPs. It may very well be that a conventional DSP will provide similar perfomance as long as we are using all the whiz-bang features.
(as opposed to using as few features as possible - which regular ASICs should still do much better than anything else).
best
Vladimir Dergachev
I see. Thats a good idea too. We just have to look for a company willing to do that. I have long been convinced that designing the hardware like this is the only way to go.
-- Blood is thicker then water... And much tastier John Davidorff Pell
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