The key to making this work would be understanding IBM's needs and
goals enough to figure out what OGP could do for them. That would take some
research and discussion, by someone with the right business talent to do the
digging and understand the answers. It doesn't sound to me as though anyone
here has that talent, with the possible exception of Tim and his partners.
Once that's accomplished, then perhaps it would be possible for
Traversal to negotiate some kind of deal. Ya never know.
I would venture a guess that if IBM decides to invest something into
OGP, the least expensive option for them would be to fab the prototype chip
lot in-house.
Another thing to think about is who are the possible customers for
OGP chips, besides boards built by Traversal and sold directly to end users.
Manufacturers of commodity motherboards, maybe? It ought to reduce their
costs and give them a stable ABI for default on-board video. That would
require a driver for MS-Windows, though.
Tim, I just had another thought. Tooling up that first batch of
chips is the big financial barrier. The cost of a mask set and a batch of
chips is heavily influenced by the choice of CMOS process, right? Could an
older, less dense process possibly produce a large enough gate count to
build a useful, less feature-rich OGP chip that would fit a subset of the
application universe? (I suspect not, but it would be dumb not to ask the
question. There are foundries that specialize in that sort of thing.)
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