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Open Source 3D Hardware
An anonymous submitter writes: "Open Source haven icculus.org has updated with a new project: Manticore. Different from most Open Source projects however, Manticore is hardware. It is a 3D graphics acceleration design, coded in VHDL. Although still fairly early in development, its goals are similar to those of other 3D cores, from companies like NVIDIA and ATI. The project includes an SDRAM controller for storage, and a VGA unit for display, in addition to the 3D rendering core. It is available under the Design Science License. Source, Documentation and other information available at the Manticore Homepage."
Why dont they put it on Open Cores?
Thats where all open hardware projects are.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Bugger! Lets try again.
What they need is an XESS board
I used one when I made my MIPS clone and it was huge. I could fit an array of 14 full 32 bit processors on one Vertex chip all working at 100MHz. The cool thing is that they also have a VGA port and a DAC.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Such cards do exist. They generally cost at least a few thousand dollars though.
Also don't expect a fpga based card do outperform a dedicated circuit. Youll need an order of magnitude (at least) more silicon area to make a circuit on an fpga than on an asic, and you can never hope to match the speed.
Furthermore you will need appropiate software to synthesize and run place and route on the fpga. These generally cost from around $10000 each, Though prices are negotiable. If you can manage with less you might be able to make do with the vendor provided synthesis software, but don't expect good results. Synplicity or leonardo spectrum (to be replaced with Precision Synthesis) are the good choices.
There are many patents related to 3D graphics processing, hold by companies like nVidia, Matrox, ATI (just go to www.uspto.gov and search for your favorite graphics hardware company). And since this are not "software patents", they are already valid around the world. Are these guys considering this?
Unfortunately the xst synthesis software that xilinx provides is next to useless. If you do your own optimizations, then fine. If you rely on the synthesis software to optimize (and quite frankly handcrafting logic optimizations isn't my idea of fun) then you won't get very good results.
Xst isn't terribly compatible with regular synthesizable VHDL either. Expect some revriting.
As for fitting a cpu core on a fpga: Sure cpu cores aren't particularly big (even on state of the art designs, the die area is largely used for cache rather than core.)
As for pipeling: Sure you can get it up to a 100 MHz or so, but pipelining incurs penalties. You can very easily be bitten by data dependencies.
As for size, we are working on a virtex II 6000, and it can barely fit a dprototype of a design which will occupy approx 4mm^2 of silicon area on the final 0.18um asic (granted the design would have been done somwhat differently if we actually targeted the fpga)
Hardware is always "compatible" with OpenGL and DirectX. When writing an OpenGL or D3D driver, you basically provide a layer of abstraction that goes from the 3D API down to your own chip's instructions and data formats.
When nVIDIA and ATI say that their hardware is fully API compliant, they mean that their hardware implements all the required features of the API in hardware, and their drivers provide the abstraction to compute everything in hardware too.
I'm sure nVIDIA and ATI have patents on their hardware - this is entirely expected. But just as there are multiple pieces of code that produce the same effect, there are multiple designs of hardware that generate the same output.
Also, pixel shaders and vertex shaders are two different things - they happen at two different stages of the rendering pipeline. I'm sure nVIDIA has patents relating to them, but DirectX and OpenGL have their own specifications for shaders which any hardware developer can implement.
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