I'd like to see someone buy the Rendition Verite intellectual property from Micron, then make the design open, with a very small royalty fee per chip. A few cents each, at least until the cost to buy it is recovered. The Verite 2200 could be given a major die shrink by transitioning it to the latest, smallest process and used as a discreet GPU or integrated into a SOC. The shrink could ramp up its performance by enabling a drastic power use reduction and clock speed increase. With an open design, manufacturers would be able to enhance the GPU, as long as they contributed back to the source. The entire programming interface and additions would also have to be open. Verite could become a GPU to challenge all the other GPUs being used for systems that aren't "PC" or Macintosh. The other companies would either have to open up their programming information to make it easier to write drivers or they'd find themselves in the position Rendition ended up in.
Rendition was neck and neck in GPU performance with 3Dfx, ATi and nVidia, all of which were crushing the other competitors. The Verite 1000 was as good or better than the other contemporary GPUs. Then they hit a big pothole. Rendition had bought some silicon design elements to incorporate into the next generation V2100 and V2200. (The only difference was clock speed, only one card ever used the V2100 and a video BIOS update clocked it up to V2200 speed.) It took them six months of troubleshooting and going over the sample chips with an electron microscope to find the flaw. In that time, ATi and nVidia had leapt ahead another design generation, 3Dfx was floundering and companies like S3, Cirrus Logic, Number Nine, Trident, and a dozen or two others were out of business completely or about to be, bought by ATi or nVidia (or about to be) or quit making video chips to focus on other products. Micron bought Rendition and even hired most of the people. Made announcements that they would continue to develop products (Rendition was working on a couple of successors to the V2200 but didn't have the $$$$.) Micron even promised to finish the work on a full OpenGL ICD for the V1000. None of that ever happened. Within a year Rendition was dead and buried, existing only as a sub-brand name for a line of mid-range price Micron computer RAM. I'd think Micron would at least want to be able to say to their shareholders "Well, we finally got the money back on buying Rendition." (Nevermind about inflation, the number's the same in the bookkeeping.) To sweeten the deal, the Open Verite GPU could be adapted to work tightly with some fast Micron RAM, perhaps even integrating with a bunch of RAM in the same package. A tiny, fast, low power GPU packed with a gig of fast Micron RAM could find a lot of uses, even in desktop and laptop PCs but especially in mobile devices with high resolution displays. The GPU section of the die could be open design while keeping the RAM parts proprietary - especially if designed so the interface between them is a straight line so if needed the RAM could be cut off to package the GPU alone. On Friday, May 5, 2017, 4:02:03 PM MDT, Charles Steinkuehler <[email protected]> wrote: eMMC is the flash memory used in just about anything that has a decent amount of in-device storage but doesn't use a SATA style HDD (think cell-phones, iPads, tablets, etc). ...probably not a raspi killer at ~ $100, but given the state of the GPU on the Pi (and most other ARM SBCs) it may make a good platform for anything that needs a GPU with decent support for anything other than Android. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
