On Tuesday 05 April 2005 20:30, Timothy Miller wrote: > You are losing sight of the point behind this prototype card. The > idea is for the hardware engineers and early testers to have a > platform to work with that can be reprogrammed, probed, prodded, etc.
I really don't think I've lost sight of the point. For many of our project members, $300 would be _major_ money, equivalent to the price of a whole, brand new PC. > But no matter how much you strip off it, it's never going to be > cheap, because the production volumes are going to be very small. Right. But we should try to do two things: 1) hold the cost down without neutering it 2) look for those pre-order commitments. Speaking of which: http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?3dc4rdlb (2906 signatures) We need to ask the question again, and see how many of those want the fpga card (sooner) and the asic (later). > Remember, we started with having a plan with no profit, where the > FPGA-based boards would be sold basically at-cost, in volume so that > we could build a brand identity for the next version. That didn't > fly, so the new plan is to be profitable much earlier. That required > focusing on the embedded space, designing an ASIC, and getting higher > volumes. > > This puts the FPGA version on the back-burner in terms of > cost-cutting, and in fact, cost-cutting HERE would do nothing but > hurt the project. Those who buy it will be hard-code hobbyists and > universities needing prototype boards. But the POINT behind the > board is so that we end up with a relatively bug-free ASIC for the > final product. I'm dead certain that a price in the $500 range would decimate sales of the prototype board. Whereas at $200 it's likely to be hugely popular. I, for one, am enthusiastically anticipating the availability of a relatively low cost fpga card with video output. I feel that this is the most interesting aspect of the whole project, and not just for me. Do we need to do some research to confirm that? > Now, certainly, we don't have to populate all the parts on what we > sell to the hobbyist, but that's not going to affect cost much. I'm reading your message as: the primary cost determinant is sales volume. Well, when we're just a little further along, I think we need to publicize the progress again and re-run the petition, stating more accurately what will be available, when and for how much: 1) A (relatively) inexpensive fpga card, maybe around August with working 2D accelerated graphics and tv out, OpenGL 1.3 support still a little shaky but getting there. !reflashable! !hackable! 2) A faster, cheaper, cooler running asic card, maybe around Christmas. A solid, if somewhat dated OpenGL 1.3 performer. Great for X. Great for mplayer. !open specs! (Making my best guess here.) 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)
