Vinicius Santos wrote:
On 4/3/06, Timothy Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[snip]
That all being said, some of all of the Linux community will shift
over time to wanting to have programmable shaders and hardware vertex
processing. With products like OGC1 funding us, we're going to want a
piece of the game market. In the shorter term, I can't help but
wonder if we couldn't produce a simpler design (probably which runs at
a much higher clock rate) that is fully programmable. I personally
will have to try not to get distracted by it, but there's no reason
why the community couldn't attempt to best the OGA1 design by spec'ing
out a programmable architecture.
Until the next major OGD-related event, what do you say to spending
some time discussing some different ideas?
The first problem seems to be prototyping a full programmable gpu in
fpga. It's pratically a superescalar generic processor with my past
researching on fpga mailing lists showed to be not feasible, but I am
not an expert.
But I like the idea, specially because programmable vertex/pixel
shaders aren't important only to games, but CAD(in a generic sense)
as well. And let's not forget uni-verse ^_^
So we don't simulate the entire thing in a single FPGA.
I also think that we should not be afraid to "do it differently".
Perhaps we should design a graphics coprocessor board to hang off a
HyperTransport expansion connector. Break down the major functional
areas into seperate smaller chips connected by high speed busses through
a decent crosspoint switch and hang the whole thing behind a HTX
interface. Each functional area could be simulated in an FPGA (maybe
even smaller cheaper ones). In some cases, perhaps certain chunks could
be handled by existing off the shelf processors. Could you simulate 16
programmable shaders by themselves in a FPGA? Maybe use a PPC with some
very tuned altivec code for geometry setup (perhaps the complete OGL
stack?).
Trying to simulate a fully programmable, fully pipelined GPU as a whole
unit is something that takes million dollar pieces of hardware to do.
We can't do that. As someone famous one said, sometime necessity is the
mother of invention.
Patrick M
Patrick M
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