Dieter wrote:
Specifically, we do not want to build the bus interface into the
chip. Currently we would need support for AGP and PCIe based
MotherBoards,
For slot based cards, "currently" would include PCI as well as AGP
and PCIe.
It appears that OGD1 will be PCI-X for some reason. I hope this
doesn't carry over into OGC1.
but we have no way of knowing what we would need next year.
My crystal ball says AGP will go away very soon. My crystal ball says
PCI will go away, but slower than AGP. The problem will be too few
slots per board. (Even worse than now.) My crystal ball says PCIe
will be good for several years.
The real unserved market is Ethernet, but I don't expect to be able
to convince anyone of that.
We can compete with commodity items as long as the commodity items
have closed source drivers. However, we can only compete on this
basis with Linux and BSD users.
Or provide something (in addition to openness) that the commodity
items do not.
Yes.
Can we get the performance we need with 65 nm or do we need to go
smaller?
If the design were ready today, could we even get 65 nm? Isn't AMD
still using 90 nm?
If I want an OpenGL card, I will buy a nVidia or ATI card that is
reasonably well supported by an open source driver. In fact, I
already have, several times. Sure, I can't play games with
texture compression, or using the very latest card, but that will
apply to an OGP card too. But, guess what? The Radeon 9200 (with
open source drivers) in my machine will probably outmatch any OGP
design, and will cost a negligible amount of money by the time
any OGP design tapes out.
Is there any area where the OGC1 is faster than a Radeon 9200/9250?
Or equally fast with less CPU load?
This is something to consider. While nVidia and ATI do not
actually make native OpenGL cards they do dominate the market to
the detriment of the *NIX graphics market.
Solaris is some form of open source now, right? What graphics/video
chips do Sun's machines use?
Their 2D board is based on an ATI chip. I presume that ATI gives them
full details.
The 3D boards use 3DLabs chips.
I haven't checked to see if there are Open Solaris drivers for them.
AFAIK, they don't yet offer linux drivers for them.
I, personally, do not want a 3D card for GUI use at all. I want a
GUI that works, and works responsively, and smoothly. Ex-Amiga
users will know what I mean. Everyone else has yet to experience
what I am talking about.
I have not experienced what you are talking about but I do
experience what I think that you are complaining about. IIUC, this
is not a function of the graphics card but rather of the way that
*NIX does multitasking. UNIX will block user I/O to do other
things -- a very broken idea for GUIs. Some distros try to
ameliorate this by bumping X up to Nice=-10, but I don't see that
this really helps.
What versions of Unix block I/O to do other things? It is normally
I/O that gets preference.
I am talking about user I/O -- mouse and keyboard.
You mention "distros", so is this something specific to linux?
My 400 MHz Linux box (with CONFIG_PREEMPT=y) stops accepting keyboard or
mouse input from time to time. This happens often with Thunderbird and
Konqueror but happens with other apps as well. While this happens, the
disk access LED is flickering so it must be disk access that is blocking
keyboard and/or mouse I/O (i.e user I/O).
I think that what you need to address this without rewriting parts
of the Linux Kernel is to have a CPU dedicated to running X.
If so, someone needs to rewrite the Linux Kernel.
Yes, this may be needed. The major issue is that GUI apps do not run at
higher priority than other processes (user apps can not be set to nice <
0 except by root). Also, the app for the window that has focus needs to
have its priority increased automatically.
--
JRT
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