On 3/3/06, James Richard Tyrer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > James Richard Tyrer wrote: > > > The GX 533 costs $80 so it would probably make the price point but might > > now be fast enough. Note that there is a rule of thumb that the selling > > price of a production product is less than the parts to make one would > > cost. > > Correction TYPO: that is 'might *not* be fast enough'.
I think it would definitely not be fast enough. You'd be better off with no graphics acceleration and using the host CPU to do all the computation. You might point out that the peripheral bus (PCIe or whatever) is a major bottleneck, but even in 2D graphics, there's often enough computation overhead that the raw data movement over the bus would be faster than an embedded processor could compute it. You'll gain some efficiency by parallel processing, but that's about it. And it's pretty well established that you'll get far greater performance out of a specialized design in an $80 FPGA than you will out of an $80 CPU. This reminds me of this one 2D GPU design I was working on once. The idea was to create a middle ground between pure software rendering and full hardware acceleration. Even in simple graphics processor designs, you could never saturate the GPU's memory bandwidth by doing software rendering (unless the memory were really slow). So I thought about creating a hardware renderer that had very simple span-oriented primitives. By encoding the software rendering in this way, you could typically get fast GPU performance. The drawback, of course, is that you're saturating your host CPU and bus utilization, but you would have been doing that anyway with a software renderer, only worse. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
