On 9/6/05, Jack Carroll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > OVERALL ARCHITECTURE NAME > Working from earlier suggestions in this thread, I suggested that > OGA be the generic name for the entire graphics architecture being developed > for the ASIC and its board products. It would not be the name of any single > product, it would be the umbrella trade name for the whole architecture and > all the products that use it. > Thus, once the customers become aware of the meaning of OGA, they'd > know the compatibility offered in any OGA product. > If we're wildly successful, there may be succeeding generations of > Open Graphics Architectures, with different register interfaces. They could > be distinguished as OGA-1, OGA-2, etc.
Ok, this is good. > > DRIVER NAME > Since all OGA (or OGA-1) products should look the same to the driver, > the X.org driver could reasonably be named oga. Maybe not identical, but similar enough that the difference would be a few run-time checks here and there. When we're still working in FPGA form, chip revisions will come out on a regular basis. It would be a pain to try to keep every driver backward compatible, so we'd probably have a driver release with each bitfile revision. But the ASIC 1.0 will be out long enough that when 1.1 comes out, that driver should support both 1.0 and 1.1. > > SPECS AND STANDARDS > The specs that document the Open Graphics Architectures (OGA-1 and > any later-generation successors) could be issued as Open Graphics Project > documents. The typical numbering practice in standards organizations is to > give each document a unique identifier made up of three fields: the name of > the issuing organization, a unique integer, and a revision letter. > Following that familiar practice, all published documents that OGP > standardizes would form the OGP series. > As an example, the IPC standard for printed circuit board acceptance > criteria is formally called ANSI/IPC 600 or ANSI/IPC-600. It was initially > issued without a revision letter. The next official version was > ANSI/IPC-600-A. I think it's up to D or E now. > Since we wouldn't seek accreditation from ANSI or ISO as an official > standards body, our prefix would be plain OGP. I suggest reserving that > letter combination for OGP standardization documents, and not use it in any > part numbers or trade names. Thus, OGP documents would be numbered OGP-1, > OGP-2, and so on. Ok. Will we want to keep any correspondence between OGP and OGA numbers? I suppose we'd start out with OGP 1.0 and eventually we'd get to OGP 1.12 or something and decide that's got what we want as a final design and designate that to correspond to OGA 1.0. Is that what you have in mind? > > ASIC PART NUMBERS > > The biggest problem in IC part numbering is to avoid conflict with > the hundreds of thousands of existing part numbers. There are > well-established IC part number format practices. ICs aren't sold directly > to computer users or builders, so they can be numbered according to IC > practices. Yeah, the primary purchasers are ourselves and embedded-systems vendors. > It's very common to pick a 2 or 3 letter prefix to uniquely > identify the manufacturer. This opens up an entire conflict-free universe > of company part numbers. > Following practices used by National Semiconductor, Analog Devices, > and Linear Technology, I proposed TRV as a Traversal prefix, and TRV14 as > the basic part number for the first OGA chip design. It would have suffix > characters for performance grade, temperature range, and package -- again, > in accordance with typical industry practice. > I researched TRV as a company prefix and TRV14 as an IC part number, > and found them free of conflicts. Actually, TRV10 and up were all free. What are TRV1 thru TRV9 used for, and is there any reason to be concerned about how their owner would feel about us using 10+? > > GRAPHICS BOARD PART NUMBERS (NAMES) > > Your suggestion to use OGC for cards using OGA chips should work > well. OGC could be both a generic trade name for a broad family of boards, > and the start of the part number structure. Boards are likely to spawn new > generations much faster than chips, so it would probably be wise to put a > number after the prefix right from the beginning, as you show below. As > noted earlier, I'd also include the bus type in the prefix characters before > the first dash, because each bus type requires a separate bare board layout, > and is thus a distinct product family. Ok. And would there be any correspondence (roughly) between OGA and OGC numbers? > > > > > As for the PCB, one chip will give us many boards. We could just give > > them OGC names, completely independent of of the ASIC revision. And, > > as discussed before, we could name the model where a letter > > corresponds to a feature, of course preferring popular letters like > > 'X', 'L', 'Z', and 'Q'. :) So, we'd have the basic board being the > > "OGC1 X" (because it has TV), and a version that has twice as much > > memory is the "OGC1 XL", etc. > > When you get into specific features, we should be dealing with part > numbers, not trade names. It might be helpful to have a few names for broad > families of boards, such as "the OGC1 family". The logical association > between a few family trade names and a large block of systematically > assigned part numbers might also be helpful, but it should be remembered > that names and part numbers are different things with different purposes. > Part numbers don't contain spaces. Ever. For any kind of product. > MRP managers will scream bloody murder if you try it. They don't even like > slashes, or other characters that have special meaning in command lines. > I've been screamed at for that. The accepted character set for part numbers > consists of letters, digits, dashes, and decimal points. Anything else > should be considered with great care. > So, a legitimate part number for a PCI graphics board belonging to > the OGC1 family, with an OGA chip and TV and DVI output options, might be > something like: > > OGC1P-128VD That works for me. > > The standard options should have fields at fixed locations in the > part number, and have mnemonic coding if possible. This marketroid stuff > with X and XL having purely arbitrary meanings, if they mean anything at > all, is a PITA to someone trying to figure out what to order. Call the > video-out option V or TV, or something a customer can remember. > > DEVELOPMENT BOARD PART NUMBERS (NAMES) > > > > > > > We'd need a different name for the FPGA development board, since > > > it's not a fixed implementation of OGA or whatever we finally call it. I > > > suggested Bridgehead the other day (or Beachhead). Opinions? > > > > I don't see why we can't continue with the same naming convention. We > > could use OG, because it IS associated with the project, or we could > > use TT because it's a Traversal product, so it's TTP1 or something > > like that. I think OGP for that is nice, but it might cause > > confusion, unless the Open Graphics Project is renamed to something > > like the Open Graphics Foundation, but that's pointless until there's > > a group of contributors large enough to need their own governance. > > Well, if you buy the idea of reserving OGP for the OGP document > series, how about OGD (for development) or OGF (for FPGA)? Not that there's > anything wrong with OG, but OGD is perhaps more specific. OGD could be both > a family trade name for all the versions of development boards, and the > prefix for development board part numbers. > I'd still tack on a series number and bus letter, to create a number > universe that can encompass later design generations and multiple bus types; > thus, the first designs would have part numbers that begin with I prefer OGD. > > OGD1P > > How's that sound? Brilliant! :) _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
