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Bitboys Silicon Sighted
ZaPhY42 writes: "The Bitboys look like they've actually produced some working silicon of their mythical XBA Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture-based graphics card which they were previewing at Assembly 2002. Photos of the card can be found here(1)
and here(2). What next? Duke Nukem Forever gets released by 3DRealms? ;)"
I want one.
oh yea FIRST POST sucka!!!
Does this means that the chicken feather is not usable anymore?
This, as well as another of other posts (even on the front page right now) were first seen (by me at least) days ago on HardOCP. ...A sad state of Slashdot affairs, indeed.
Does anyone else notice how much that looks like an FPGA at the center of the board?
...on rye bread with some mayonnaise.
Please be gentle! I found these in the forums
The future isn't what it used to be.
I guess they are using two 128-bit buses to maximize memory bandwidth. I don't see what is so revolutionary about this. Unfortunately, if the graphics processor itself is slow and can't utilize the bandwidth, what's the point?
Case in point... the new Parhelia by Matrox has seen some overclocking and they have found that performance percentage gain is linear to core clock speed percentage gain. It's still a slow card relative to the current FPS kings.
On a side note, I am a Matrox fan and have owned a G200, G400max, and will be getting my Parhelia soon. I don't game as much and can use three monitors. =)
Bitboys are famous for announcing graphics cards and then never delivering. Over the past five years or so, there have been plans and supposed agreements with other companies for at least three graphics cards which would blow the competition away. Not a single card has ever been released.
DNF will be the Pack-in.
:)
Guess you get to decide who's to blame for the holdup.
Congratulations sir on your truly awsome troll.
Notice later on in the forum: "I have few more images from Presentation, but my site bandwidth is driving owner nuts already so I'll try limit it..."
Man, he's probably really pissed now.
Having seen the demo at Assembly 2002, some clarifications are in order: The demonstration and presentation was about their new display acceleration solution for mobile devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. It is a basic graphics accelerator with support for vector graphics (polygons, beziers) with anti-aliasing, double-buffering and transparency. Even texturing is optional.
The demo they showed was indeed an FPGA. It has around 20k-30k gates, and was running at around 25MHz or so. The demonstration animated filled polygons and bezier curves, with various effects such as transparency at around 30-50 fps.
Obviously we are not talking about something that would run Doom 3! Having said that, their solution looked very interesting from a mobile point of view, since it could provide acceleration for UI, SVG and simple games with a very low cost, in terms of gates and power consumption.
So I'm not much of a hardware guy, but why the LED (?) numbers?http://solidhardware.com/sn/bb/P8010048.JP G
Even in a clear case they would be parrallel with the floor/desktop?
why oh why did they have to make it the "Xtreme" bandwidth architecture. I thought the whole "start-your-acronyms-with-x-for-extreme" died out awhile ago.
at least XML doesnt stand for the eXtreme Markup Language...
This is unbelievable.
I'm I caught in a second reality?
Congrats
These guys are f'ing geniuses
Second Reality was the shit
If they can focus that level of ingenuity into making a graphics cards.. I recommend everyone to sell off any ATI and nVidia shares they have, because those companies will be going out of business.
Yep, that one board definately has and FPGA on it. So that means the bitboys haven't produced any silicon yet. This is a prototype.....
Who know if it works well or will actually be fast?
Life is too short to proofread.
I think "will they succeed?" is a really interesting question, for this company.
I presume they've still got Psi (Sami Tammilehto). He was the Carmack of the demo scene, an innovator in realtime graphics programming, back in the early/mid '90s.
Finland has proven, with Nokia, that it can compete on a global scale with consumer products. But this startup feels a long way behind Nvidia, ATI and the other established players.
Will their chip be good enough to find people to license it? Will the drivers be good enough to compete with Nvidia? What market will they target (hardcore/mainstream/mobile)?
I think this news raises more questions than it answers, but for love of the Finnish demo crews alone, it's worth keeping an eye on them.
it uses slashcode... what good is slashdot when they jsut link to slashdot clones... oh wait i cant get all the goatse.cx links and page wideners... so can we say we slashdotted slashdot?
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
A genius, PSI (Sami Tammilehto) is still with them making this dream come reality. I believe they are going to make it this time.
This was announced a couple of days ago. Need to at LEAST /. the site the day it comes out. Come on now, get the act together. Prompt server crashing is a must around here!
Oh, waitaminute... ;)
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Its at ftp://ftp.asmparty.net/pub/seminars/010802_2000_Gr aphics%20hardware%20for%20handheld%20devices.wmv
Its 108 megs. Not too slow yet
You could have previewed your post before clicking submit. DemoDVD will be pretty cool when released.
Pixels keep you awake!
No, Value releases Team Fortress 2.
Who cares about this pathetic crap, NVIDIA and even ATI now will own them. They are nothing but talk, dont give them the time of day.
nvidia u rock for having such great linux drivers!
first post
Well, it has. So I go to this assembly'02 site and find a link to The Scene.org and start looking around. Man there is some slick stuff there. And archives that go back to Future Crew's 2nd Reality. I can remember getting that to work on my 40 with my Gravis Ultra Sound.
Anyway, just brought back old memories. Now my chip is up to 59C.:)
J:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
As you can tell, the card as displayed in the photos has no heatsink...can we surmise then that this GPU is clocked at a very slow rate for compatibilty purposes?
...or that they may at sometime in history lay challenge to Intel's dominance of the integrated chipset market circa 1997?
...we will see this when DirectX 10.0 parts hit the market. :)
Or perhaps that Transmeta will couple it to its ulta low power, ultra low performance line of CPU's?
That little LCD display being driven by the Bitboys GPU is nice...only if we want to run in 120 x 70 display mode.
Cut the donkey-puck, BitBoys. Put out the hardware on production level silicon. Until then, we can't take your promises like going to tape out in 1999 for real.
Maybe in another 3 years the tape-out silicon will reach production, until then, what then? Synthetic benches run on an imaginary system looping an imaginary benchmark under synthetic conditions?
"Current Openings" I'm afraid I might see...
Now hiring:
Marketers - We need dedicated people to hype non-existant products that on paper outperform all the competitors, Combined!! We will never have an actual product for the market, but we need skilled marketing professionals to make people think one day we actually will.
Engineering - No Current Openings (and never will be)
All jokes aside, there really is a connection between Duke Nukem Forever, and the BitBoys.
When the members of the famous demo group the Future Crew(Think "Second Reality") finally got full-time jobs, there were a couple of shops they went to. First, some of them went to 3D-Realms, which produced Max Payne(Skaven did some of MP's music), and of course, does work on DNF. At the same time, some of the other guys broke off to work at the BitBoys, as they were really more of hardware type. So who knows? It may very well be possible that both sides are holding things up to release together, all because of where they came from.
The demo they showed was indeed an FPGA. It has around 20k-30k gates, and was running at around 25MHz or so. The demonstration animated filled polygons and bezier curves, with various effects such as transparency at around 30-50 fps.
Yeah, but the demo unit they showed was the relative size of a tank to a Yugo...they want to put THIS into a MOBILE device? Mobile devices come with an ISA slot? Ya, ya, I see how it's all for test and NOT production and all that, but you think that BitBoys would have shown something smaller for the mobile market than something you could barely fit into a standard ATX case!.
Not to sound stupid, but why is this special? Who are Bitboys and why should I know them? Anyone care to fill me in?
The Free desktop that Just Works
If I ever meet you I am going to kick your penis bird!!
Looks like one of the cards is even driving three -- yes, count 'em -- three 7-segment LED displays!
:-)
Imagine the number of frames-per-second of ultra-low rez polygons that card can deliver!
Okay, I need some more sleep.
dreamer out...
Bitboys held a seminar in Assembly '02 regarding graphics hardware in handheld devices. In that seminar they had a hardware-accelerated demo of their technology. That demo was done using Altera FPGA-chip. It has hardware SVGA-acceleration, FSAA (of awesome quality I might add!) the works. Before the seminar I thought "Who needs 3D-acceleration in PDA/mobile phone?". After that demo I'm convinced that it's a must-have feature! :)
After the seminar I (and others) managed to talk with them. They had their PC 3D-accelerator on display, along with sample chips. They are pulling out of the PC-business for now in order to focus on the mobile stuff. The chops is called "Axe" and it is working. They are testing it in-house as we speak, and new revision of the chio is coming up. But it will not reach consumers because Infineon is killing the silicon-process at the end of the year. The chip had 12 megs of eDRA and it was somewhat bigger than other chips out there.
You can get the seminar from:
ftp://ftp.asmparty.net/pub/seminars/
It's the one called "Graphics hardware for handheld devices". I'm the guy with the laptop
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I would'nt hold my breath waiting for one of these. Can sniff the vapour all the way from Finland. Give us the real sh-t that we can put into our computers and benchmark.
DemoDVD will be cool because it has legendary Future Crew demos which were programmed by PSI alias Sami Tammilehto from Turku, Finland? The same guy who has something to do with this new gfx adapter? ..just remember that Sorcerers, also from Turku, Finland was the first PC demo group ever.
(no, 2nd post)
Thanks for the flambait biatch. ACtually you are wrong. What do you mean PS2 has something similar? Similar to what? Similar to the stanky fart I just unleashed! Shut your trap.
2 days ago I saw at www.worthplaying.com a banner which clearly had the text 'Duke Nukem Forever: pre-order NOW!'.
:) I bet the latter.
Apparantly it's almost done... or a scam
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I am not really waiting to see any 'Future Crew Demos', dont assume things. I want the next DemoDVD which will have C=64 Demos/Intros on it. PC Demos and Amiga Demos do not excite me but the C=64 rocked and demos show off the best parts of the computer!
Pixels keep you awake!
"It has hardware SVGA-acceleration..."
Obviously, that should be SVG (as in Scalable Vector Graphics)-acceleration.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Many forget about the enormous work it is to start from scratch, the card might not be able to compete with the latest offerings from nVidia or ATI but in the value market it can find a place. Next incarnation might be good enough to compete with the latest models from the big ones.
The only mistake bitboys has made so far is that of the PR department trying to hype their product(s), but that was probably necessary to attract investors.....
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
All bitboys has done is made a wider memory bus. They try to make the case in the press release that memory is handicapping gfx performance no gpu. Historically gfx cards have used some of the fastest memory they can get, but the capability to widen the bus is nothing new and not an accomplishment. The graphics card business is cutthroat and widening the memory bus made for better performace than the industry giants would widen it (and have). No matter how fast you can fill you memory and retrieve data from it, you need a GPU that can process the data fast enough so that it isn't just sitting there. What the bitboys have done is relatively easy, not new and if it was such a good idea than NVIDIA would do it first. Instead they only do it when necessary(for instance the N-force needed a wider bus to utilize cheaper system memory to also serve as a frame buffer.)
Somewhere there are some really stupid venture capitalists funding these guys.
Interestingly enough the BitBoys are actually ex-Future Crew guys. As are members of the Max Payne and 3D Mark teams.
Future Crew Timeline
And Skaven was even competeing. In fact he won the "Instrumental Music" category with a new version/sequel to his previous winning song "Catch That Goblin".
Anyone interested in MOD/ULT/S3M/IT/XM/669 music from the demo scene should checkout Nectarine Radio.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
This is almost the same architecture that the PS2 already uses with its 2048 bit datapath to some embedded RAM it has... Also the gamecube uses embedded RAM that is faster that usual memory but there it is not used explicitly but works more like a cache. What's new about this??
Monkeys are flying out of my ass!
You didn't think Jesus on E's was a great demo? Wow, some people are hard to please ;)
Linux, SSH, IRC, Nokia, Max Payne, 3D Mark.. what is this all about?
It's one thing to propose embedded memory in a paper design, and another thing entirely to get this working on silicon that sells. PS2 did this and Sony deserve much credit for delivering product. Execution is what matters in the graphics business. nVIDIA understand this. Architecturally or academically, what also matters, given the ability to execute, is elegance. Tile based rendering is an elegant idea, but it's a pig to execute it. Elegance is nothing without execution, and brute force isn't even elegant.
Bitboys, Oy produces a chip? Well, Mozilla 1.0 came out, so I guess anything is possible.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yea.. right. I just read on another site, that it has been hinted that DNF wouldn't be seen in 2002. And the most amusing thing is, George Broussard has had to admit that the graphics won't be as good as those in Doom III.. so why the huge delay on this damn game? They must have switched engines on it at least 3 times..
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I'm saving my money for this card which was hyped on slashdot. Sounds much more cool. Then I'll put it in a PC with a Transmeta processor along with my Seti@HOME PCI card. I can't wait for all those cool Loki games to be released so I can take advantage of the chip, I can just download everything from Freenet.
One of the cards appeared to have a kluged power cable attached, and a DVI connector plugged into it. However, since there was nothing connected to the AGP connector, I have to assume the card displayed wasn't actually functioning at the time, or at most it was passing a signal through to the DVI output without doing much to it.
A fine tradition of bilking investors' money.
To that man behind the curtain.
Oh yeah, that's the ticket, we'll increase the memory bandwith by sticking the memory on the same die as the GPU!
Graphics companies have been increasing performace by cranking up the bandwith since 1995. The fact that the Bitboys are going to such extremes to make the most of the same optimization just shows how close to the end traditional graphics hardware designs are.
Tiling (no, that's not a postscript virus) is the next big step. Hell, at least powervr has been shipping actual silicon, more or less on time. Each succesive powervr release shows better and better performance relative to the more traditional hardware. The real advantage comes into play with higher resolutions. Eventually the market will catch up to them. I just hope they can hang on until that day.
I too thought about the paraphelia and the 3 monitor thing... thought it was pretty cool and definitely could use it -- but that's until i realized that it only goes up to 1280.1024 on each of the monitors.
i am assuming you use 20/21 inch monitors, and 1280 just seem wasteful on a 21 inch. 2x1600.1200 gives the same pixel count, without giving you as much clutter on the desktop (3 monitors).
so if i eventually gets enough $$ for the 3 monitors, i will probabbly get a good card for primary (so still *can* game) and then two pci cards (they are still around, somewhat) for the other two, so i can drive the resolution to full on each monitor.
just some thoughts i collected during my search for the perfect desktop.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
When developing a system, it's always typical to overspec hardware a LOT so you don't have to make many hardware changes during the design process.
At work I'm dealing with a system that has a few FPGAs and DSPs on it, along with some RF hardware. It currently consumes 6-7 amps at 24 volts. It's expected that by throwing away a lot of our "excess" silicon, we'll be dropping that to an ampere or two, simply because EVERYTHING on that board is massive overkill.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'd heard that some of the FC guys had gone off to BitBoys Oy. and 3D Mark (Didn't know about Max Payne). But I haven't heard of FC or Demo-ing in years. I'd figured that M$'s attempts at hardware abstraction had killed them off. Glad to hear there's still a demo culture out there. And they're producing some pretty slick stuff.
The site I linked to in my Grand-parent post also has archives of FC's music. I didn't see any recent demo work from FC - must be too busy with their jobs in the industry...
J:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
The BitGirls are perhaps a bit more interesting than the BitBoys. All computer generated. Click a girl then "photo" for the image gallery. Click to enlarge. There's a movie button, but it's greyed out. Maybe someone can find them?
:)
Keep browsing if the first one you try is a bit cheezy. Some of the computer work is quite impressive.
Just think, in a couple of years the BitBoys may be able to render the BitGirls in realtime
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The Radeon 9700 is getting nearly that (19.2 GB/sec) with current technologies. In 2000, this would have been impressive. Now, its not nearly enough to make for a good architecture.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"Somewhere there are some really stupid venture capitalists funding these guys."
Those still exist in the wild?
Do you have their phone number?
It's one thing to propose embedded memory in a paper design, and another thing entirely to get this working on silicon that sells.
A GPU with an on-die frame buffer isn't just vapor on paper. There's one in a video game console from Nintendo called the GameCube. PCs with the GameCube hardware, called Dolphin development kits, are available to a select few.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Last time I checked, GameCube is no PC.
No, but Dolphin is. Dolphin is the workstation that GameCube developers use.
What's the difference between a PC with a video card and a PC with a console on a card?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Just in case you younger folks don't recall exactly just how long ago BitBoys started promising hardware, there were quite a few people that I talked to that decided to delay purchasing a 3DFX Voodoo 2(!!) because the BitBoys card was "right around the corner.
This is a whole different realm of late, approachable only by the likes of HURD and possibly Duke Nukem as mentioned earlier.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Call me when they have running silicon. Until then it's just more smoke and mirrors.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Wouldn't the bottleneck be the AGP bus? Even with the new 8X spec?
-- taking over the world, we are.
yet another POS hardware be a retarted company that won't support your' lord and fucking master: Microsoft.
Go to hell, see you fudgepackers with me
Of course, when I read this headline I immediately thought of our pint-sized West Virginian friend.
Mod this off-topic a tad, but how the hell do I get a job like George Broussard's where I can just run a development team indefinitely and never release a product?
People kind of chuckle about Duke Nukem Forever, but I mean think about it; surely Duke Nukem forever is the worst case scenario in software project management 101.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
You're not trying to impress me with your developer credentials are you?
No, just pointing out an additional example. If both GCN and PS2 do it, and they manage to make good graphics on a budget (a PS2 chipset + a joystick + a DVD-ROM drive + a DVD decoder license < $200), it's only a matter of time before the tech comes to the PC. Expect good things from ATI in the near future.
I'm not even a licensed developer; I'm just a lowly homebrew hacker. Here's what I've done on the GBA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Still... 32bits colors, when everybody else moves into a HDRI (high dynamic range imaging) format that will be supported by most monitors (not LCDs and not as well as monitor built especially for per say 64/128bits colors in the future (higher contrast ratios).
Anyways the point is, they are talking about 20Gb/sec bandwidth.. comparing themselves to a Radeon 8500. They aren't shipping yet, Radeon 9700 is shipping, has about the same specs, has a brand recognition, has more bitdepth, Matrox has more features and bitdepth, Nividia will probably ship their before bitboys even start sampling... and they will support HDRI as well.
So what's the point? they got a proof of concept on an Altera FPGA running, good for them, any new technology is welcomed and I usually appreciate it, but in their case, they made so much vapor in the last years that they've lost all respect and credibility to the few of us still interrested in their stories. If they demo something extraordinary, I'll be impressed. I'd say evolutionnary could be a better expectation.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.