I must say I'm rather disappointed after reading the announcement of
the parting with the hardware manufacturer. I had forgotten all about
the negative comments on slashdot and googled the project after
thinking about how much I wanted it. I got really exited when reading
other discussions. But I guess that after evaluating the online poll
(less then 10 000 people in the close knit OSS society could be
bothered to vow their support, even if over 60% of them actually buy it
we'll have a big loss on our hands) they called it a day.
I think this really underestimates the potential market. I knew I
wanted mythtv and bought the hardware everybody talked about, no not
the Haupauge pvr 250 as that one is almost unavailable here in Europe,
I bought the more expensive haupauge pvr 350, more expensive but
everybody says its the most compatible. And I did not pledge to buy it
on beforehand in any mythtv forum. I have not seen or signed your ogp
poll but had decided some days ago to wait for june and order one at
200 euro. But in my excitement I wanted to be amazed some more and read
the mailing list and found sad news.
So what is my profile as a guaranteed buyer?
I wanted Linux / KDE / Mythtv
I know they look great but I heard they can be a bitch to configure
hardware wise.
So I buy what the community says is well supported for safety.
I was forced to buy an fx5200 for almost 100 euro as, oops, nvidia
nforce does not mean that minimal VGA support is always integrated.
Now, I read about an fx5200 like video card codenamed ogp with out of
the box linux support and a bright future of support and likely some
amazing tweaks for just double the money. Yeah I'd buy that, we'd all
buy that; a great future protecting against obsolesce for less then a
high end video card.
But now I read it'll cost 5 times a minimal card, I can never defend
such an expense. Hello, Bebox / Amiga / research fan sales, that does
not sound like a large target market. And for us followers there will
be a static card later on, that is popping the dream of a bright future
of endless possibilities.
What do I want instead?
A cool name and a dream backed with some facts for a discardable
premium.
The name
Freeforce X11 sounds like a proper graphic card name and has many winks
to its OSS market, although you might be scared of a nvidia attack over
the nforce name now that you're on your own.
Freeforge X11 I guess would go well with the OSS crowd but marketing
wise forge is not a beginners class English word, making it harder to
remember for international consumers and has some resemblance to the
negative word forgery. It is best not to be marketed as the open source
community ripping of capitalist industrial designs and laughing them in
the face with it.
Freefox X11, sounds as fast as name one and has OSS written all over
it. I like it.
The dream
A Dual-DVI port is one part of the dream. Maybe inkjet printing
displays or OLED will cause a revolution or my income will increase and
I can afford something like Apple's biggest screen, resolution wise
this card can support it.
FPGA is another part of the dream. First of all it allows buying
without thinking as any bugs wil later be fixed or possible features to
be expected from such card will eventually be supported by the army of
OSS. It allows for some wild dreams like small optimisations to allow
speeding up SVG display or even live theora encoding / decoding. Quite
funny that both projects called each other vaporware because of a lack
of endusers while both have made great progress and are going strong.
VRAM expansion is another way to get linux wannabe power users excited.
I do not use my 768MB RAM but I think I may use it and that it may keep
my computer from slowing down because of swapping issues. A VRAM DDR
slot will help sales and not just to uncertain / bet on the safe side
buyers like me or CAD / fluids emulation researchers but also for
desktop linux users on outdated hardware.
You know Apple is doing a OpenGL desktop already and linux has some
wobbly experiments out, but did you know that Trolltech hired someone
specifically to make this happen modularly with X11 for KDE (and other
OSS of course)?
It will be great if a DDR slot will allow for a 1152 MB introduction to
catch everybody's attention, even though the 1024 MB would not be a
default install and it can't help to gain any fps in any game as KDE 4
will have other uses for that memory, especially on an older PCI based
machine. Imagine KPDF having the rendered pages of a hundred page pdf
document cached in VRAM; that would mean fast scrolling on a 200MHz PCI
machine while PDF's are considered slow even on a GHz machine. Image
loading the entire content of your 1024 MB SD photocard straight to
VRAM and scrolling through 7 megapixel photos at blazing speed while
your CPU remains mostly idle, I know there is OSS code to decode
jpeg2000 on the GPU so this is not far fetched. Imagine KDE running as
fast as the feature reduced lite window-managers on slow hardware, or
seeming even faster as obscured windows remain cached in VRAM because
it uses OpenGL window composing.
Discardable premium
Sorry for being blunt but you seem to have been run over by
enthousiasts with little money but lots of time and rich professionals
looking for a cool hobby. Therefore you may feel that the real backers
are willing to pay more and the bigger Linux market can only be
captured with bargain prices. But I think the sweetspot remains just
below the 200 mark. The active individuals who contacted you may not be
the lion share of the market, I think the lion share are like me;
hardware followers willing to pay a small premium to stop the
configuration hurting, especially if it looks like unlimited free
software upgrades in the future.
That is why I think an expandable customizable fpga based card at 199
is the sweetspot. The 199 euro would be including the 20% consumer tax
common in Europe, so in the US an out of state order could also be 199
dollar. 10 000 units should be easy, we are followers we want what
works, what other people praise about, what they use so we can install
without typing any configuration codes.
So what about the cheaper ASIC based videocard?
It sounds a lot less revolutionary, I don't think I'm gonna replace my
5200 with it because they both can display linux and play tuxracer.
Firstly I'm looking forward to seeing optimizations in the fpga. Having
a custom layout optimized for Theora HDTV coding sounds great for
really free mythtv although perhaps a bit unrealistic even if some-one
has already done theora fpga for themselves. Upgrading educational
Windows boxes to KDE Linux may result in a compromise fpga layout to
get the most out of such slow machines. So how can you decide what the
real buyers want set in stone anyway? Good point, so I suggest polling
the real buyers. Generate a random second part of the serial number for
each produced fpga card and let users tell you which fpga design they
prefer using in the card, you might be surprised.
Questions for ASIC decision in a form on a webpage:
_______________
Type the serial number stickered on the card: [ ]
Choose the fpga image you use in the card from the popup list:
_______________
Perhaps set up an fpga image library like kde-files.org and
kde-look.org and ask the question in the fpga loader (if the community
creates a GUI for that, using kde get-hot-new-stuff API users could see
to it that only well tested fpga images are pulled from the site into
the application). Like display settings do also use a confirmation
countdown which could ask 'press enter to keep the settings, press esc
to revert to the previous image' and other loading instructions over
the audio channel.
It seems you look at the fpga as a high-cost expense keeping you from
getting into the massmarket but I think its a premium feature
convincing Linux users to buy a little more for future sake, just like
I paid a 50% premium to secure the future by buying a deluxe
motherboard (yeah, deluxe has no igp, I know what that means now:-)
Sell it like it's:
_______________
Future proof
Completely reprogrammable graphics chip.
Ready for optimizations by original designers and dedicated hobbyists.
Ready for complete customizations; rush through special scientific or
multimedia tasks like only a custom chip can.
Simply download different chip layouts from the internet and (re)load
them without reseting the computer.
_______________
Thanks for all your hard work so far,
Dennis
P.S. No, I don't care about the RTL (because of the complete
documentation effort). But promising to release the RTL as GPL after 2,
3 or 5 years depending on the sales sounds as a great idea to my ears,
especially as businesses have written off this equipment by then.
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