Jon Smirl wrote:
quoted text
> On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 22:21:41 -0500, Patrick McNamara wrote:
>> howard parkin wrote:
>>> I think the current goals of OGP and the needs of GPGPU are not really
>>> compatible.
>>>
>>> They want supercomputing power. Lots of compute power equals a big chip
>>> (like the Clearspeed CSX600 - 0!). A big chip is expensive, which is
>>> incompatible with the 'Open Graphics for the masses' goal of OGP.
>>>
>>>
>> I'm not so sure they are.  Perhaps they are inconsistent with our current
>> approach.  Perhaps that approach should be revisited.
> 
> The risk of a card for the masses is that the masses will actually buy
> them, i.e. send in the cash, not just say they will send in the cash.
> If a couple of high profile people start saying negative things they
> can effectively kill your sales. What if AMD/ATI goes open spec? Your
> main selling point disappears.

I pointed that out.  The solution to this is (real) product differentiation:

	X on the card
	Ethernet card in a small box
	Both together
	Scalability (without having to buy more cards)
	<etc.>

We can also, as TM pointed out, we can offer more and better support to 
smaller customers.  Open Source also means community support will be 
available.

quoted text
> Going GPGPU looks lower risk to me. There are a limited number of well
> financed players in GPGPU. Some of these groups even build their own
> chips. The design can be pitched to each of these groups and you'll
> get a definite answer. Either they will buy a couple thousand or
> they'll tell you what is wrong with the design. These groups posses
> high end engineering resources which will give valuable feedback.
> Besides, you need to build the shaders sooner or later anyway. Nothing
> is really lost.

See my other post: "A few words in favor of multiple chip architecture"

quoted text
> If you pitch all of the groups and no one is interested, then you have
> your answer in a reasonable amount of time. This process is more
> deterministic than "build it and pray that they will come".
> 
> Don't think that you need to beat NVidia/ATI in the first round. Just
> build one really good shader, the GPGPU people know how to multiply
> and figure out if it is feasible to squeeze 32 copies on a chip.

If we can offer a a fully programmable GLSL chip that does correct IEEE 
math, we will have an advantage over nVidia/ATI.

quoted text
> Overview of the NV7800 architecture:
> http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/geforce-7800gtx/index.x?pg=1
> 
> Start a thread in the forums at http://www.gpgpu.org/ That should let
> you judge the interest level.
> 
> You also aren't limited to FPGAs. There is MOSIS.
> http://www.mosis.org/ 

Good, such a service as I mentioned used to exist is still available.

quoted text
> With the educational discounts available it can
> be quite reasonable for what you get in return. You have access to
> cutting edge processes like IBM's 90nm low power process. You could
> even get really lucky. IBM doesn't have a 3D chip design, they might
> take a liking to yours and sponsor it.

Yes, if IBM would help, they have lots of money. :-D

quoted text
> There is also a lot to be said for software simulations before you
> turn anything into a circuit. You could spend months coming up with a
> cutting edge shader design. Do you want one large SIMD shader or lots
> of little ones? Unified or separate fragment, vertex and geometry
> shaders? Direct X 10.1 includes both float and integer support in the
> shaders. Is the FPGA stage really necessary or is it possible to go
> straight to silicon via MOSIS?

I would start with the fragment shader and have a standard CPU (possibly 
with some extra hardware) feed them.  Bottom up design.  And 
programmable fragment shaders are what GPGPU needs.

quoted text
> On another topic, it is possible to build a graphics card without VGA
> support and a ROM. It's not like you are trying to run Windows on
> these cards. Anyone interested enough to acquire one of these cards
> can switch to a custom GRUB and kernel video driver that don't use
> VGA. Most Macs don't have VGA support and no one ever notices when
> they run Linux on them.

The problem is that PC MotherBoards expect VGA to boot and _configure_. 
  Not being able to configure your MotherBoard (and not being able to 
see the error messages) is like a major issue.  Now if they were all 
well behaved and always used the Video BIOS calls, it would be no 
problem -- the problem is that we are dreaming if we think that.  The 
easiest solution is to just use a VGA core.  We could start with the one 
from Open Cores:

http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/vga_lcd/overview

or we could use a commercial VGA core.  Either way, we could concentrate 
on the 3D stuff and not waste time reinventing the wheel.

-- 
JRT
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