> It is actually the FGX processor which would be of interest to us. I > have wondered if it would be possible to have a graphics processor based > on multiple SIMD processors from standard MPUs. I was thinking of the > AltiVec; however, the SPARC is available free.
This has been disucussed here several times before. It isn't a viable option for two reasons: a) Fixed function hardware is relatively easy to pipeline, and is smaller so we can fit more units in the same area. Variable function hardware (aka shaders) is more complicated and you generally need much higher clock and shorter pipelines, which aren't feasible to implement on current FPGAs. b) 3D rendering is a very specialised task. Using a general purpose core adds lots of overhead for things that we just don't need. Even a relatively slow special-purpose FPGA can get much higher thoughput and better performance/watt than the fastest general purpose CPU. Paul _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
