A couple of years ago, when I was following this project, we had some discussions about the volume problem. One of the challenges was that, once OGP came up with an HDL for the GPU, it would then need to be turned into an ASIC before it could become a consumer open-hardware board.
I remember hearing from you (from Timothy Miller, specifically, I think) that it would be necessary to raise something like $2-3 million to fund the die production for the ASIC, with the unit cost falling to something like $30 a piece. That seemed an insanely, impossibly high target to achieve without corporate backing at the time. No longer. Several Kickstarter campaigns have raised that kind of money -- for computer games and for other kinds of hardware. If you know you can deliver it, and you can make it into a palatable form (like an open-hardware graphics processor for laptops, desktop computers, or (my favorite) media centers, then you very well might be able to just run a crowd-funding campaign and pay for it. I'm not saying this is necessarily the right decision now for OGP, nor that you are necessarily ready, nor that the OGD1-derived hardware is the thing to fund this way. I'm just saying that you shouldn't forget this possibility exists now as a real working system. What seemed impossible a couple of years ago is a feasible strategy now. Cheers, Terry _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
