On Sun, 2006-05-14 at 12:34 -0500, Richard Smith wrote: > Seem to me Ray what you are thinking as embeddedy is a bit below the > target for the OGA asic. The embedded we are talking is the the > single board pc market type stuff. The throw a PC at it area.
*nod* Fair enough. I want to be proved wrong here. :-) > > > > save a lot of money during development using an off-the-shelf x86 > > > > CPU/chipset combo (or perhaps even standard motherboard) with support > > > > that is good enough. > > Have even tried to get these off-the-shelp x86 chipsets for a design? > If your aren't talking serious volume its really hard. No. I may end up there in about four months, though. > And in my experience with using these chips the support mostly > non-existent. Or worse the rep tells you there is support but by the > time you reach a real problem you already understand more about the > chip than most of the FAE's and can't find (or not allowed) anyone who > _really_ understands the hardware and can anwer difficult questions. *nod* My experience is that support is always non-existent, for just about anything. :-P No matter what you pay for or who you talk to, it's not worth the money or time. You get any source code and documentation you can and you figure it out. > > C) Cost is important too. $30 is ... high. That's a lot of money to blow > > on one chip. My CPU probably wouldn't cost that much, in at least half > > of my embedded designs. > > Thats on par with all of the x86 video solutions I've looked at. Fair enough. > > > (a) OGA cannot do what we need and > > > I am still trying to point out that that is not the point of my > > discussion. I am trying to say "Is what we think we need sellable?" > > It works for me. I have several designs where the OGA chip would work > quite well one of these had an EAU of 12k/year. *nod* OGP would need 10 customers like you to make a go of this, ignoring NRE costs, which will still be huge. I hope I am too pessimistic and there is a chance here... > > 3) Make a simple 2D chip that is really easy to interface to. Make it > > produce digital signals to drive LCD interfaces directly. Lets face it, > > if an embedded app needs a screen, its likely to be an LCD panel > > nowadays. Mayyybe include some inputs to read a touchpanel or stylus, or > > shaft encoders, or maybe a button matrix scanner and some LED drivers. > > This a possibility. I have a design I'm working on now with a NIOS II > that is a display product. We have a custom LCD controller in there > with it. We have talked about replaceing the NIOS II with an ARM9. > The display controller is really simple. Basically a DDR controller > and a FIFO for me to push data into the display ram. Works for our > purposes but I find myself really needing some graphics type stuff > such as display to display moves or some composting between display > pages. > > It would have to be _really_ cheap though. This is all in a $15 altera part. Sure. Cell ASICs fit inside that bracket easily. I looked at having one made around a year ago, and a 50K gate design was a $2.50/part in 10K lots, I think, and NRE was quite reasonable. 200MHz was quite reachable too, and the had onboard PLLs. This is one of my problems with the OGA design.. I think it's too much with too high NRE costs... Cheers, Ray _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
