On 6/22/06, James Richard Tyrer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> With a graphics card that runs the X server, you would offload even more >> overhead. :-D > > True, but is it worth it? Don't know for sure. This would be a unique product. Although I note that this wouldn't be a totally new idea. TI was pushing this idea although I don't think that a commercial product ever made it to market. DEC used to sell workstations which had a separate processor to run the X server. IIRC, this was not nearly as powerful processor as the main CPU.
The primary benefit from an X station is that it's a stand-alone network device. You don't need much of an OS internally. The rule of thumb with hardware is to do as much as you can in software. That doesn't mean to overload the CPU, but if you cut you die area in half by offloading some things to software, costing you only a few % CPU load, that's a HUGE win. A lot of what you do in the X server doesn't require much CPU time. For instance, telling a GPU to draw a filled rectangle doesn't require much computation for the CPU. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
