What do you mean by "dumb terminal"? In my world, a dumb terminal displays monochrome text only, usually 24x80 chars, and usually talks via RS-232. Things like an ADM3a.
No, I mean commodity PC hardware used just for keyboard and mouse input, and video output, talking to a 'CPU server' over ethernet. Most people I guess call this 'thin client'.
By video, do you mean motion, like watching TV/movie? Even more silicon required. Awhile back I proposed building a Ethernet X/video/audio server using the OGP ASIC chip. Less expensive than the OGD1.
I mean video -- i.e., a 'CPU server' creates a stream of images sent over ethernet to a 'dumb terminal' which spits it out on a screen. I guessed OGD1 could create this stream, but due to Fisher
Implemented by video card developers? I doubt it. What is more likely is general purpose CPUs built onto the graphics card, so you can download a raytracer at runtime.
it seems it would be better to simply have the CPU of the 'CPU server' do this. That leaves us with what we have, awaiting multi-core CPUs for real time ray-tracing. Only I can't seem to justify the money for OGD1 in every 'dumb terminal' with Matrox G450s so cheap... but my 'distributed' style of computing, I guess, is rare with 'consumers'. (Interestingly, companies are realizing, despite the surplus of PC hardware, a large distributed system of cheap parts costs tons in power consumption. Hence the new wave of low-power multi-core CPUs. (I wonder how much Google wastes on electricity.)) _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
