Hugh Fisher wrote:
Simon wrote:
Regardless of the cost of designing a better solution, my point is
that using a general purpose CPU is likely to be infeasible, because
the price will be too unattractive for the hardware to be profitable.
This discussion has now reached the point where we need some
hard numbers from a hardware person (which I'm not). So who
has experience on buying a CPU (ARM component or complete
CPU) vs developing custom floating point ALUs? Timothy?
To be practical, both cost and power wise, this solution would have to
be based on an embedded chip.
AMD Geode processors can be used to make a graphics card. They support
MMX and 3D-NOW. AMD states that they fully support Linux on these.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/ProductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863,00.html
The GX or LX would be a single chip solution. It would be inexpensive,
but I don't know how fast it would be. They have the advantage of
having hardware VGA. The LX is a bit faster than the GX.
The NX is faster and also has SSE. It is faster, but it does not
include video or memory hardware. This is not designed for a HTX
connection. This would require another chip, probably custom, for
video, system bus, and memory controllers. If we wanted hardware VGA,
we would have to buy it or use the OpenCore (which isn't complete yet).
If the SIMD float hardware in the CPU and the video controller in the
custom chip could be closely coupled, this might make a good high end
board. Like the current 3DLabs boards, this would need to be IPLed on boot.
AMD has announced an ATI northbridge chip: M690T which contains an X1270
video chip. Like all new AMD stuff, this has no memory controller, only
a HTX connection. No mention of Linux support in their blurb. :-(
--
JRT
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