Mail from ILUG-BOM list (Non-Digest Mode) EDA is going open source with a vengenance. Altera makers of FPGA has announced porting of all it's development tools to Cygnus solutions development system. So you can now develop Altera based designs on Linux. Altera probably did not know that MAGIC a fully open source and free tool for ASIC design was available for donkeys years. Only the Altera design libraries were a problem. Compiling and simulating large gate arrays are very CPU intensive. Pushing thes designs thru windows was a major pain. So hopefully in a few months time I could frame the Window CD with a garland. Also Intel IA64 (Itanium) simulator and SDK is now available for free download from Intel. You can now compile, debug and run 64bit apps on 32 bit machines. Gaming machines: A gaming machine consists of a Risc processor and a Graphics Processor (GP) with built in memory. The GP also has all rendering and drawing algos in hdwr. The resolution and color depth are fixed. The pixel data (which is precompiled depending on the game) is loaded into the GP memory and the RP issues a stream of simple instructions. The GP hardware executes the instruction (in hrdwr). It is perfectly suited to displaying precompiled pixel data. On hind sight (which is a very exacting science, I am told) web browsing (mostly) just displays precompiled pixmaps and the PC is a bit of an overkill for that. The game machine can download, display and render very well and would make a perfect X client. So a cable connection and Linux os would make a great combo. Add a Rs.200 MP3 chip and you have a Rs.8,000 home client - mp3 player - game machine. The sale forcasts are so high that Sony decided that they were better off selling the chips and the net service than the machine. Turns out that CAD/CAM, molecular and genetic modelling etc work on the same principle today. Upload your data, compile it on a supercluster, dowload the pixmap and view it. The sale forcasts are so high that Sony decided that they were better off selling the chips and the net service than the machine. They have to invest $1.2 billion for producing chips in sufficient volume. If they make the machines additional 6 billion, besides time and other logistic difficulties (like allowing competitors to step in). Open sourcing the design effectively shuts out competition (for competing chips, designs, games and Application Services) and makes Sony a lot richer. So who says you cant make money from open source. You only have to think innovatively. Had some one like SEGA or Nintendo done it (they have better hardware) they could have wiped out Sony. In a PC, graphics memory is external to the GP. The CPU usually generates pixel data loads it into the main memory and then makes the DMAC transfer the data to the GP memory (in case of Frame Buffer drivers the CPU writes directly to GP memory). Generating the data is quite CPU intensive and results in slow graphics. PCs have variable resolutions. This raises the cost of hardware acceleration. Keeping memory outside the GP slows down everything (approx. 10 pico secs per cm of track, 20 pico sec per connector, 5 nano sec per IC pin, 70 ns memory access). __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos -- now, 100 FREE prints! http://photos.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Linuxers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
