Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 29 Jan 2004 16:29:23 GMT | From | John Bradford <> | Subject | Re: [OT] Crazy idea: Design open-source graphics chip |
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> 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?
Err, well there are always the server and embedded markets, if the device was cheap enough.
> 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.)
WHAT!? You are making the project out to be several orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive than it is.
Did you know that you can generate a 625-line TV signal with little more hardware than a Z80 CPU? Some 8-bits actually did that.
> 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?
Quite a few. Think of the TV-connected embedded appliance market, for example. Displaying a static menu of choices isn't exactly very demanding.
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