So, what does the future hold?
An open source driver for the Intel graphics NorthBridge chips which
supports all of the graphics device's functions.
Total and complete documentation for the ATI Radeon chips.
If these both happen, I don't see that we would have a viable product
(time to market is a serious issue here).
This leaves three areas where we wouldn't have direct competition.
We could try something like the Oxygen board that would support the
current OpenGL release.
But, we aren't even sure that tying our product to OpenGL is a good
idea, and this would take a lot of work.
We could make a graphics board based on the Intel 945 NorthBridge chip.
There are several possible configurations for this, but basically it
comes down to: 1) without any CPU on board (probably a bad idea), 2)
with a MCU (to do house keeping stuff and boot the chip) and the system
bus sharing the front side bus, & 3) with a MPU on board to do house
keeping, boot the chip and to run the X server. And the system bus on
the I/O bus. Unfortunately, the bad news here is that we would probably
still have to buy BIOS technology to run the NorthBridge chip.
We could make a graphics board based on AMD/ATI stuff that probably
doesn't exist yet. This would need to have a memory controller and AMD
has started putting them in the CPU chips. But, the graphics controller
needs to be able to read that memory. AMD will probably offer a
solution to this. However, will they offer a low end/low power
processor? Or they might offer their own NorthBridge with (ATI)
graphics for the Geode NX?
The other alternative would be to see if we could enlist the help of a
company to make a custom NorthBridge for us.
--
JRT
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