Hi guys, I'm down here in Canberra, and things are very productive. Many people you would recognize are here. In particular, Keith Packard is here (of XRender fame). He would buy the FPGA for $200 without thinking at all, if he could. That is just a data point. I continue to believe that if we can hit that price point (with a _very_ slim margin) that we will guarantee a sell-out of the first production run. And thus guarantee that there will be a second, more profitable production run.
Richard Gootch (of lkml FAQ fame) will buy the card if it can replace his Matrox, and if it supports X color lookups in hardware (which we will therefore take special care to do correctly). Others want to know where to sign up to get a card, and when they can get it. I continue to believe that the FPGA card has the makings of a hit, if we can control the price. Other ideas: can we have a header on the card for a battery, and put a fairly decent amount of flash on the card without blowing up the cost too much? That way, the buyer can add the battery and have an intelligent NVRam card for cheap. That in itself would be a powerful reason to buy the card. I would certainly buy an extra card, just for that. On the expandable memory front: is it possible to design pads on the card so that somebody with a soldering iron could solder on some more ram, in theory? I had a specific "I'll buy it if it does" request for that feature. Of course, if we don't have that, it's only one sale to kiss goodbye ;-) Keith Packard was _very_ positive about the design decisions made, that is, stick with a OpenGL 1.3 fixed function pipeline. I did not need to explain to him why it would be useful. And there is progress on the hdtv front. Apparently, it is _probably_ practical from the signal encoding point of view. What about the electrical/mechanical interface? A certain well-known Linux journalist might be interested in taking an in-depth look at the project. Regards, Daniel _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
