Just letting people know that I'm going to be starting a branch for Cell driver development over the next few days.
We've had a couple of PS3's hanging around for a month or so now and we've put a bit of time into playing with them - the Cell processors are pretty impressive little devices, with solid amounts of performance and bandwidth - right up in proper GPU territory, though not at the ultimate high end. Tungsten Graphics will be putting some of my time and others to get this started, but it's a big task & there should be room for lots of people to make a mark on the driver. Several people have already expressed interest in this. I see this as a chance to push forward on a couple of fronts. Of particular interest to us is the runtime code generator and shader compiler. We have been developing something we're calling the "Tungsten Graphics Shader Infrastructure", which is intended to be a retargetable compiler for GLSL and similar high level shading languages, anchored around shared intermediate representations and a common optimization framework. I should be able to thow some documents up on the web soon to throw a bit of light on this. Secondly is to note that the Cell driver will essentially be a hyper-optimized software rasterizer, targeting of course a fairly unusual CPU. It is of great interest to me to use this project to advance the general state of software rasterization in Mesa, as well as produce a specialized instance of such a rasterizer for Cell. We'll be looking at this as the driver evolves, but it should be possible to move forward somewhat independently in the meantime. I've got a bunch of bits and pieces of code that Michal and I have written over the last few months that I'm going to try and sort into a cogent whole which will serve as a starting point for the driver. Keith ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Mesa3d-dev mailing list Mesa3d-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mesa3d-dev
