Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 29 Jan 2004 11:30:44 -0500 (EST) | From | "Richard B. Johnson" <> | Subject | Re: [OT] Crazy idea: Design open-source graphics chip |
| |
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.
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |