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On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge)On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge)Posted Jul 21, 2006 17:10 UTC (Fri) by irios (guest, #19838)Parent article: On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge)
I dunno about patents, but don't current Intel graphics chipsets offer fully documented free drivers with a full OpenGL implementation, and great 2D graphics performance with video playback? And for the price of an OGP card, you can get TWO laptops with Intel built-in graphics. Plus, the 3D performance in Intel chips, while it certainly wont blow your wig away, seems to be way ahead of what the OGP project is planning.
In all, I think it is highly unlikely the OPG will ever succeed. I wish them lots of fun and learning, and hope they don't waste too much money.
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On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge) Posted Jul 21, 2006 17:30 UTC (Fri) by pontus (subscriber, #3701) [Link] About the price; the $1000 unit would be a "prototype board", the intended audience for that would probably be hardware designers looking to prototype their graphics algorithms in FPGA form before doing an ASIC. Not desktop users :)
If their technology is good, it could be cost effective, in which case there could certainly be opportunities to raise capital to get to an ASIC and consumer boards.
On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge) Posted Jul 21, 2006 20:13 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] As far as I know there isn't anything like it.
If the FPGA board goes to completion then it ends up being a reprogrammable video card.
Basicly from a hardware hacker or student or hobbyist's perspective your ending up with a fully documented ready-made PCI card with a 128 megs of memory and a rather large fpga chip that they can play around with for all sorts of purposes.
Video encoder/decoder for instance. There is already a documented open source design for a theora encoding FPGA chip out there.. It was developed to move a HD-quality stream of data down a ethernet pipe from a electronic camera to a recording station. The chip it was designed for was much much smaller then this one.
Something like that may be usefull for people who would like to have a HD-quality real-time video editing and compisition workstation without having to have the renderfarm to back it up. (If it's at all possible, which I think it could be)
Or maybe something like a custom CPU? There are the Sun's Sparc chips which are open spec. Then there is the Opencore project. http://www.opencores.org/ How would you like to have a hand at designing your own cpu?
Or how about using Linux DM/MD (or maybe ZFS?) in conjunction with that to create a device that will create offload the proccessing power needed to stick a large RAID 10 array that is not only fast, but compressed and maybe encrypted?
I suppose the PCI bus will be a big limitation on what you can do, but maybe they will have a PCIE version.
Or a crypto engine for cracking code.. or a crypto engine for encrypting and compressing gigabit ethernet connection?
Or instead of OpenGL rendering acceleration.. maybe a vector based rendering acceleration? Something like that.
Or maybe your a hardware designer that needs something reasonable device for building some special purpose embedded computer componate. If it's something very custom, maybe only a few hundred units or less, then having a relatively cheap ready-made PCI device could come in handy.
My point is that a device of this nature is fairly unique. Of course I am no hardware hacker, so I am just going off what I've heard from other people. Could possibly be a untapped market.
I don't think that it would ever work like open source software works.. The price of entry is too high and you need to have special programming tools and the tools and languages are all pretty propriatory in themselves. (although the company they are getting the FPGA from supports linux for that stuff) But it may be usefull thing for lots more then just people looking for a video card with open source drivers.
Eventually if this works out then they'd release a ASIC version of the video card that would be targetted at embedded hardware developers and Free software folks. It would be faster, have lower power usage, and be much more inexpensive. Something that is open and fairly powerfull may be attractive for embedded developers and should be good enough to drive all that XGL eye candy and simplier video games.
It would be the only video card that would be open enough not to just work with full capabilities under Linux, but also FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly BSD, Solaris, ReactOS, those BeOS clones and other smaller and oddball operating systems. I wouldn't be suprised that if you have a OS that can run GNU tools and the MESA opengl stack that you'd be able to get it working without much troubles.
On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge) Posted Jul 21, 2006 17:48 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] The fact that Intel is being friendly at the moment is nice, but it's nothing to count on for the future. Corporate benevolence can change at a moment's notice, on one executive's whim or bad digestion, it seems. So having a truly free (from the start, and by design) video card is a very good and noble thing to strive for.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that there are people at Intel that are generous and open-minded in regard to having free drivers. But the pressure from certain quarters might begin to be applied to shut that down, or bring it under Digital Restrictions Management, which would be the end of that right quickly.
On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge) Posted Jul 21, 2006 20:07 UTC (Fri) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] Once upon a time ATI was completely free-software friendly, but that changed. That's anecdotal evidence that your warning is very apt.
On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge) Posted Jul 21, 2006 20:16 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well ya Intel isn't friends of open source any more then IBM is.
It's just a business opertunity and they are one of the companies that get if you want to have good Linux support you need to cooperate with open source developers. (duh) It's purely practical. (and for that I bought their hardware for my latest desktop.. and I'll probably buy their hardware for any new laptop that I would want.)
Intel on other fronts aren't so hot. They are one of the major proponates of DRM, for instance.
On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge) Posted Jul 23, 2006 13:56 UTC (Sun) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link] And exactly where can I buy an Intel-based graphics-card to use on a motherboard without the Intel-chipset, say on an AMD-board ;-)
Intel-based graphics cards Posted Aug 2, 2006 21:35 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] And exactly where can I buy an Intel-based graphics-card to use on a motherboard without the Intel-chipset, say on an AMD-board ;-)eBay might be good. (Search for "i740", for example.) Greg P.S. Oh, you meant a current Intel-based graphics card... ;-)
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