Messages in this thread | | | From | Tim Connors <> | Subject | Re: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable? | Date | Fri, 22 Oct 2004 12:18:23 +1000 |
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Greg Buchholz <linux@sleepingsquirrel.org> said on Thu, 21 Oct 2004 10:08:08 -0700: > Stephen Wille Padnos wrote: > >I guess I would look at this as an opportunity to make a "visual > >coprocessor", that also has the hardware necessary to output to a > >monitor (preferably multiple monitors). > > This idea is a step in the right direction. To make the project > viable, you might be better off trying to court a slightly different > audience (instead of the cost-sensitive/3D-performant market). What if > instead, you were selling a highly parallel reprogrammable computing > core, which also happened to do graphics? I could see a potentially > much bigger and higher profit margin market for a standardized interface > from Linux to an FPGA. Image people buying them for headless servers as > crypto accellerators. Or as DSP/FFT accellerators (for speech > recognition , MPEG compression, or whatever). I'm sure you'd sell a few > to grad students writing theses on data flow machines, parallel > languages, prime factorization etc. Heck, I'd buy one just because it'd > be cool to try and write a 1000 element merge sort in hardware that > completed in one or two clock cycles. It's not hard to imaging people > using it to speed up emulators like QEMU. Maybe the distributed > computing folks (Folding@Home, SETI) would also be interested, since > their work is already highly parallelizable. You get the idea.
People would happily pay millions for this.
Tim has probably heard of Grape?
I don't know whether grape uses FPGAs or not, but take a look at the photo down the bottom of this:
http://grape.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~fukushig/paper/sc96/sc96.html
I reckon if we could put an accelarator card in each of our 200 new machines, that could be programmed on the fly to do N-body calculations, or then changed to do SPH, or whatever, and we only had to pay $500 per card, and it doubled performace, we'd do it in a second. Half the number of computers, drop energy consumption (and cooling), etc. It'd be great.
-- TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/ A mouse is a device used to focus xterms. - 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/
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