This sounds like it could be great! Does Xilinx have any kind of demo board we can buy that has a PCIe connector on it? We could use that for FPGA development. Does the embedded ARM core for sure have the NEON extension? (They don't always.)
But in any case, we already know that a general-purpose CPU core makes a terrible GPU core, even with SIMD support. Larrabee demonstrated that. That being said, it could be a great deal of help. We could really use a CPU on-board (which is why we designed one for OGD1). I've started in again tinkering with the GPU architecture we spec'd out for OGA2 (and by spec'd out, it was really very informal). I'm sort of just gradually chipping away at it. Should a prototype stream processor ever emerge, we can see how many we can fit on an FPGA. Producing an ASIC is another matter, however. On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <[email protected]> wrote: > it looks like xilinx may have laid the golden goose - can i ask people > here to help evaluate this: > > http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/epp/zynq-7000/index.htm > > that's an incredible combination of a state-of-the-art FPGA, about the > same capabilities of a Spartan 3 4000, with an on-board 800mhz > Dual-Core Cortex A9. > > the existing interfaces include some quite basic ones that should be > expected - USB2, I2C, CAN-bus, RS232 and so on, but then also include > 2 Gigabit Ethernet and, in the case of the 7030 and 7040, multi-lanes > of PCI-e (between 4 for the smaller versions at 468 pins, and 12 for > the absolute largest 900-pin monster) > > now, the possibilities for this kind of combination are very, very exciting. > > 1) as there are no proprietary hard macro cells such as 3D Graphics or > MPEG engines, the CPU will undoubtedly be FSF Hardware-Endorsement > Compliant. > > 2) (someone please check!) i believe that the capabilities of the 7030 > version should be sufficient to take over from the Spartan 3 4000, > meaning that it could, in combination with the NEON instruction set, > actually be the next OGP hardware IC > > 3) with some care on the design, i believe it may be possible to > create a module which is, itself, a stand-alone computer yet that > exact same module could also plug into an OGP PCI-e card. > > so, the irony is that if you ever got fed up with the amount of power > that the desktop computer into which an OGP module using the Zynq-7000 > was plugged, you could take that module out and use the module *as* > the desktop computer :) > > i'll do up some block diagrams and post them later, but i wanted to > ask: would something like this be of interest to anyone (hybrid > multi-purpose module)? and, if so, what would you be prepared to pay, > to make sure it happened? let's assume it comes with 1gb of DDR3 ECC > RAM. > > l. > _______________________________________________ > Open-graphics mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics > List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com) > -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
