Daniel Phillips wrote:
On Sunday 10 April 2005 23:49, Timothy Miller wrote:
[ ... ]
The primary objective is to produce an ASIC for the embedded and open source workstation markets that is affordable and which has open source drivers.
We still don't see eye to eye there. You see the ASIC as where the real sales are going to be, and you're probably right, but not without the enthusiasts promoting and generating demand for it.
You are blindly assuming here that the "enthusiast market" and the "ASIC market" are something very different. Yet I very much consider myself a technology enthusiast, but want the ASIC and not (so much) the FPGA.
The point of this project is producing a video{chip,card,design} with open specifications so that it can be fully supported by open source drivers. On open or closed source operating systems, but open source operating systems are obviously the first objective here.
I am currently using an ATI Rage128 which is not very far from being the most powerful board I _could_ be using with open drivers. The TV-OUT on it is fully unsupported and in computer-time the board is about as obsolete as black-and-white television is in a different area of visual technology. Had I wanted to buy a new videocard today I could, just barely, grab a Radeon 7000 or 9200 and use open drivers that support it to various degrees of clumsiness. By the time I certainly want something different, which is when I will be upgrading to a 64-bit machine with PCI Express, I will not even have that option.
This is what motivated this project in the first place and which defines the target market for this thing much more as software than as hardware enthusiasts (let's just call ourselves geeks, okay?). If the project is also attractive to the hardware geeks by having an FPGA version that can be used for lots of neato things, wonderful, lovely, please come, but producing an FPGA board is _not_ this project's objective.
You are arguing as it at least to some extent should be and I disagree with that. There is a market for openly supported video in Linux and other open source operating systems, for a passively cooled board, for supported power managament, for a well supported TV-OUT and probably for quite a few more features in the embedded space that I'm not aware of.
It all spells ASIC and not FPGA. Again, yes, wonderful if the FPGA version used for development can be useful in it's own right, and yes, every euro less there is important for that market, yes, 200 is better than 300 and much better than 400 or 500, but please do not loose track of the objective which is _not_ producing a general FPGA board, but producing a videocard woth open specifications.
Rene. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
