I watch this IBM funding discussion and I think that funding is very difficult when it comes to creating big amounts of ASICs. However I have some questions on this approach
Since we are dealing with a proof-of-concept why are we trying to make an ASIC which will cost a lot of money for initial production run? We can do something more mainstream and have some solution with little time to market. We can make a PCI based card with a SoC like the one from Toshiba that has MIPS3D extensions http://www.toshiba.com/taec/cgi-bin/display.cgi?table=Category&CategoryID=7271 or even a NEC chip http://www.necel.com/micro/english/product/vr/vr.html or a low power SoC from Freescale that has a vector engine. We can solder 128MB or 256MB of RAM and burn all the rendering code in an EPROM. All we need are 1. A quick low power processor with FPU and integrated memory controller 2. The processor must have a PCI based interface 3. A lot of RAM 4. A RAMDAC A production run for this solution will be very cheap (less components, no USB, no IDE, no LAN, no Sound) and there are also a lot of PCI SBCs however they have more features than those expected by us. In a later stage we can put PCI-X or even PCIe easily. Of course the performance will be much lower than high end cards but we need a proof of concept and we can focus on the software. The time to market will be very short and the price will be tolerable such as the performance. We will have true 2D/3D acceleration and we can update the software on the EPROM as new updates arrive. We can even give people the opportunity to modify the code on their graphics card. In our case we can even issue board schematics and we need no help from big financial giants. XSCALE IOP fit well to our purposes but unfortunately they do not have an FPU. Sorry for bothering you but I feel this is the way to go and the VHDL way can be pursued after enough money are earned from the first production run. We should proceed with small steps. ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
