Re: [OT] Crazy idea: Design open-source graphics chip

["Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Timothy Miller wrote:

>
>
> Christian Unger wrote:
> >>No more being at the mercy of closed-development graphics chip designers
> >>who make Linux an after-though if they even think of us at all.
>
> > Oh ... don't get me wrong, i think that the conceptual idea is awesome.
> > Personally, i wouldn't know where to begin, but can the open source community
> > compete with Nvidia and ATI? afterall this goes beyond software, it delves
> > into hardware. Sure there are people with the knowledge, maybe even with the
> > means, but i doubt the financial backing would be there from the get go.
> >
>
> We cannot compete with Nvidia or ATI or 3Dlabs or Matrox or even S3.
>
> The real question we have to ask ourselves is, what would be the market
> demand for a graphics card that is 3 generations behind the state of the
> art and over-priced, the only advantage being that it's a 100% open
> architecture?
>
> I don't have $100k to have it fabricated, so we have to goad some
> company into doing it for us, and given the volumes, they'll have to
> charge way more than it's worth if you compare its capabilities against
> ATI et al.
>
> I've got some great ideas for how to do this chip, but they're frankly
> nothing revolutionary.  The obvious test bed is an FPGA.  That imposes
> serious limitations on what kind of logic utilization and performance we
> can get.  The ASIC version can be clocked faster, but we dare not put in
> untested logic.  (And we can't afford the tools necessary to do the
> proper simulation.)
>
>
> So, the big question:  How many units a year would be sold for an
> underpowered, over-priced graphics card that just happens to be 100%
> open and 100% supported?
>

With the press Linux is getting from the IBM/Linux advertisements
for the US football games, etc., methinks it won't be long before
NVidia and all the rest go open-source, just to jump onto that
band-wagon. They just need a smart way to protect their intellectual
property.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.24 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
            Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.