That is quite an expensive piece of hardware given that:
- it has an old generation device
- it has nonstandard extension plugs
The nice thing is the support for DIMMs, however is that a soft-core or
hw core, like the one in Spartan6? (there are up to 4x 12.8 Gb/s DDR3
interfaces).
There are far more accessible boards which already got some digital
video output and have support in the free version of ISE (The SP605).
Is there really a need for Virtex class device?
/* From my viewpoint, the slowness of OG development was also caused by
the fact, that the boards were not for everyone. If there would be
hardware, maybe smaller, but more exposed, the individuals in the
community could "play" more - resulting in a specialized cores / modules
of smaller scale, which can be embed into a bigger and more complex
card, by the ones, who have access to ISE licenses and expensive
hardware. */
Another playground will be a Zynq device - there is an FPGA and a CPU,
but no graphics card - development kits will be available soon.
Daniel
On 10/31/2012 03:37 PM, Patrick McNamara wrote:
In the commercial board space, something like this would be a good
fit: http://twinind.com/catalog_detail.php?id=346
Up to 2GB of DDR2 and PCIe native support in the Virtex. Good off
board connections. If you are looking for a basic framebuffer, the
all you need is a daughter card with DVI/HDMI/VGA/etc components. If
you have to do a 3D engine, the add an FPGA for the engine to the
daughter card. Let the Virtex5 do the memory interface/framebuffer
and let the daughter board FPGA do the computational engine.
The problem, of course, is that it isn't going to be cheap by hobbyist
standards. But then people need to realize that you are getting into
the realm of FPGAs that cost hundreds of dollars just for the chip
itself in single and low number quantities.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Timothy Normand Miller <[email protected]>
*To:* Ing. Daniel Rozsnyó <[email protected]>
*Cc:* [email protected]
*Sent:* Wednesday, October 31, 2012 8:48 AM
*Subject:* Re: [Open-graphics] The next OGA card?
OGD1 is open source, and the mods to add a PCIe to PCI bridge for it
wouldn't be too tough (for someone who is good at PCB design). If you
can do the board, the FPGA logic is there. OGD1 already works and can
be plugged into a PC (with a PCI slot) and booted as console.
The biggest challenge is the expense of having it produced. 25 OGD1
boards cost somewhere around $13000 to make.
Or we could start from scratch. Andre Pouliot and I had some
(slightly divergent) ideas for an OGD2, which would be based on a
newer FPGA and be highly modular.
Another idea would be to see if there is _already_ an FPGA board out
there with a PCIe on it. Actually, I'm sure there is. Xilinx and
others make project boards for their FPGAs. I don't know if you'll
find one with video on it, but if you did, we could do a graphics core
pretty easily. If not, we might be able to design a DVI daughter
board.
Another weird idea (particularly because of the signal integrity
challenges) would be to see if one of these project boards brings
SERDES outputs to some pins with reasonably good quality; we could
then design our own TMDS/DVI circuit to go in the FPGA. :) If we
could pull that off, it would be by far the least expensive OGD2
option, because it would require almost zero hardware design on our
part. We'd need to do FPGA logic, drivers, and adapt I/Os to a DVI
connector. Analog video might be out of the question.
So, here are the features we need in an off-the-shelf FPGA project board:
- PCIe connector
- Memory
- DVI and/or VGA/DAC is bonus
Can you find something like that?
Actually, if we have lots of I/Os to spare, we might be able to do
analog video using a resistor network and a low-pass filter. Someone
with a better EE background could answer that.
On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 5:24 AM, "Ing. Daniel Rozsnyó"
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Hello all,
> currently I am having quite a trouble to get my system working -
the board
> is Intel DN2800MT, with an n2800 dualcore Atom (Cedar View) - which
got that
> crappy PowerVR SGX 545 graphics.
>
> Currently, there is no driver for it for 64bit windows and the
driver for
> Linux is a binary only thing which links to an old xorg and old
kernel (3.0
> or 3.1).
>
> There is same problem with the older generation of Atoms (Poulsbo)
as they
> have also this 3rd party graphics core and comes with no support.
>
> I was thinking - would it be possible to put together a simple graphics
> card based on Opengraphics, with the following parameters:
>
> - PCIe 1x
> - single DP/HDMI/LVDS output
> - form factor to match a full mini pcie card (50mm)
>
> If I picked up correctly, there is a drive for embedded targets..
so this
> could be interesting.
>
> From the hardware point, it should be enough to use a single FPGA
with a
> single (or dual) ddr3 memories (that makes 12.8 or 25.6 gbit/s) which is
> quite enough for filling it over pcie (2.5Gb) and reading to DP.
>
> For the start, a simple 2D framebuffer with region copy
acceleration would
> be sufficient..
>
> What does the masses say to that?
>
>
> I can manage to make the hardware, is there somebody who can make
the fpga
> core and somebody to write drivers for it?
>
> Daniel
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Open-graphics mailing list
> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
> List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com
<http://www.duskglow.com/>)
--
Timothy Normand Miller, PhD
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti
Open Graphics Project
_______________________________________________
Open-graphics mailing list
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
_______________________________________________
Open-graphics mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
