On Sunday 30 July 2006 05:37, Patrick McNamara wrote: > > Sorry to pick on the video mode thread, it just happened to be the most > recent. No offense to those involved as it really is a valid > discussion; I just think now is not the right time for it. We can note > that it is something that needs to be kept in consideration and > revisited when we start working through the ASIC feature list, after we > have a working system in the development board.
You've taken the words out of mouth. The OGC1 is going to be designed and marketed to be a general-purpose graphics card, to compete in a field that is dominated by nVidia and ATi. In order to succeed well enough to be able to create an OGC1.1, OGC2 or whatever, we need to sell lots of them and make lots of money. Putting things like jumpers on a board cost money. Each jumper will increase the cost of each board by about £1 (my estimate taking into account tooling, components and extra testing time per board), especially since they're typically through-hole components, and I believe TT are trying to make OGC1 SMT-only (to save lots of money). Multiply 8 headers by £1 and by 100,000 units = nearly a million pounds that could have gone into R&D. It's important to realize that the OGC1 is not supposed to be everything to everyone. It's not supposed to be a magic bullet that solves everyone's particular graphics card gripes. Examples of things that I think should not make the final cut: - A serial port (especially so since most modern motherboards which don't have a serial port have a port as a jumper somewhere on the motherboard that you can plug a flying lead into). I suppose it it's a really popular demand, two plated unpopulated vias could be placed on the board for you to manually solder a header into and connect to a line driver. But 99+% of the target market don't need such a thing. - OOTB support for fixed-frequency monitors like Dieter's asking for. 99% of the target market don't need such a thing. And I _really_ don't see what's wrong with borrowing your neighbour's multisync DFP for half an hour so you can reprogram the OGC1 PROM to support your arcane fixed-frequency monitor. What the target market need is a 2D/3D graphics card which is fully supported out of the box on free operating systems, assuming typical hardware. Anything that distracts us from that is not worth Timothy's time arguing over. He should just ignore it. > > Sorry for the weekend rant everyone. :) Yeah, sorry about mine too. Peter -- Fisher Society publicity officer http://tinyurl.com/o39w2 CUSBC novices, match and league secretary http://tinyurl.com/mwrc9 Quake II build tools maintainer http://tinyurl.com/fkldd v2sw6YShw7$ln5pr6ck3ma8u6/8Lw3+2m0l7Ci6e4+8t4Eb8Aen5+6g6Pa2Xs5MSr5p4 hackerkey.com
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