Open Graphics Project Status Update (KernelTrap) [LWN.net]

Open Graphics Project Status Update (KernelTrap)

Posted Oct 5, 2005 1:07 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
In reply to: Open Graphics Project Status Update (KernelTrap) by sbergman27
Parent article: Open Graphics Project Status Update (KernelTrap)

Somewhat like Ogg, OG will sink or swim on whether it's taken up by self-interested embedded-system manufacturers. If they do, the rest of us benefit from the prospect of volume manufacturing. So, the best thing to do is make sure their engineers can get a working system up quickly, without per-unit cost, and then just make sure their fixes/improvements go into the common pool. At some point there will be cheap aftermarket chips to drop onto a PCIe, PCIx, PC-Card, or what-have-you board to sell as add-ons, or it will be integrated into (probably PC104) motherboards' soldered-on chipsets.

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Open Graphics Project Status Update (KernelTrap)

Posted Oct 5, 2005 3:04 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Yep. That's what the ASIC version will be targetted for.

But don't forget the FPGA version. As a video card it won't be "uber", it'll be slightly slower, run hotter, and be more expensive then the ASIC version will be.. however it does have some potential in a very different way.

It would basicly be a low-cost PCI card with on-board memory that can be used by hardware hobbyists to mess around with programming their FPGA chips. As far as I know there isn't anything like that in existance.

I am no hardware person and have limited experiance with electronics.. I don't know what sort of limitations there will exist with this card in terms of programmablity. However I know of one company that produced a network'd camera with a built-in hardware Theora encoder. It's capable of realtime HD-quality video over regular ethernet networks, and it uses a much smaller/slower chip.

http://www.xilinx.com/publications/xcellonline/xcell_53/x...

So I figure a hobby person could adopt that code that man developed and have develop a design for hardware accelerated encoder/decoder for uses in Mythtv or video editors.

Or maybe develop a way to accelerate raytracing renders like Povray or Yafray for 3d graphics? A hardware based encryption device for high speed VPNs? Hardware random number generator?

Or something like that. Who knows what people could figure out if they are able to have a PCI/PCIe card with 128megs of ram and reprogrammable proccessor aviable for cheap?

Open Graphics Project Status Update (KernelTrap)

Posted Oct 5, 2005 7:05 UTC (Wed) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]

More importantly, widespread use of the CPD version will allow the design to be well and truly shaken out before committing to the ASIC version. There have been many video card ASICs, past and present, with totally ridiculous hardware bugs. But this one should ship without major problems, owing to its relative simplicity, and the unprecendented luxury of a public beta for hardware.