I've done a lot of FPGA work. While it's true that there's way more flexibility with standard cell, making it work on FPGA is not necessarily a huge burden, and making an ASIC is _always_ more expensive. I'm not suggesting that everyone should make it run on FPGA. Just those of us who are trying to test the design before taking the risk of making an ASIC. (Even so, there will still be enough changes between FPGA and ASIC that the FPGA testing doesn't have full coverage, but it's a great way to find a lot of bugs in the core design.)
Anyhow, this is a ways off. It's lunacy to design a chip before you have a full functional simulator. On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Troy Benjegerdes <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Nov 03, 2012 at 01:44:18PM -0400, Timothy Normand Miller wrote: > > Let's not make this so overwhelmingly large that no one sees the end. > > That's one of the problems we had with the OGP originally. > > > > Let's break this down into some steps: > > 1. Design simulator for GPU > > 2. Design RTL for GPU > > 3. Get it to work in RTL-level simulation > > Let's stop at 3, to keep this simple. If we start talking about > targeting FPGAs, we start jumping through hoops, and engineering > creative work-arounds, only to find ourselves with a $1500 fpga > board. > > We don't need something that has gee-whiz features, we just need > something with a PCI-E 1x port, an hdmi output (maybe with an > encoder chip to avoid obnoxious licensing questions). There are > things like http://www.mosis.com/what-is-mosis that significantly > reduce the cost of ASIC design. > > What's the rush? Let's go with a relatively ancient process, and > try to produce RTL for a GPU that works with an opencores OpenRisc > CPU core, and clocks at 200mhz. > > At this point, I'm actually inclined to think that going straight > to ASIC is *easier*, because we can simulate the proposed ASIC > from first-principles, instead of depending on some black-box > vendor fpga tools that just break in strange ways. > -- Timothy Normand Miller, PhD Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Binghamton University http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~millerti/<http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti> Open Graphics Project
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