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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? ;)"
Please be gentle! I found these in the forums
The future isn't what it used to be.
It is: APEX 20K Devices.
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.
Oh, waitaminute... ;)
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
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.
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?
You don't put new chips into mobile phones. The accelerator would be integrated to the same silicon with the CPU or the display controller (which might be on the same chip anyway). From that perspective it makes sense to develop and demo it on an FPGA, since it would be licensed as an IPR block anyhow.
"Bitboys are famous for announcing graphics cards and then never delivering."
Because they did not announce any products. They held a seminar and in that seminar they had chips and video.cards on display. Now, in the past they have "pre-announced" products. But that was in the past. They haven't said a thing regadring their products in over 1.5 years! They have been running silent for a long time now!
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"I guess they are using two 128-bit buses to maximize memory bandwidth. I don't see what is so revolutionary about this"
If you don't know what you are talking about, then don't talk, OK? The chip has 12 megs of on-die eDRAM on 1024bit memory-bus running at chip speed. That is pretty revolutionary when it comes to PC 3D-accelerator. PS2 has something similar in it's graphics-chip.
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Back in 1995, or was it 1996, a small Finnish company by the name of Bitboys Oy announced their Pyramid3D chip. As the months rolled by there emerged successive technology reports that detailed such things as a geometry engine (transform and lighting) and projected speeds well in excess of the first Voodoo card from 3Dfx. What was never seen however was the actual product itself. Were BitBoys for real, or was it all a hoax? As I understand it, BitBoys approached a company by the name of VLSI Solutions with a chip design that later turned out to be written on the back of an envelope. TriTech Microelectronics then purchased that envelope with the intention to design the chip themselves. VLSI would then fabricate the board and another company program the drivers. Eventually some pre-production models were produced and demonstrated at Assembly '97, but just before the cards went into mass production in 1998 Tritech pulled out of the project killing it stone dead.
So it would seem that the Pyramid3D project did eventually become legitimate, even if Bitboys never were. The following left-hand image is purported to be a pre-production version of the card, but the right-hand image has been sent in by Mark Vojkovich who actually owns one today. It has 8MB of SDRAM and a pass-though connection similar to that found on a Voodoo board.
Figure 4.6
In May 1998 BitBoys Oy raised their heads once again and announced their Glaze3D chip. This chip would have a projected performance four times greater than that of the current all-conquering Voodoo2 chipset! At the time this statement caused a considerable stir, especially considering the fiasco surrounding their previous attempt. However once everyone realized that the chip would not be produced for over a year, this interest soon dissipated.
Figure 4.8
At Siggraph99 in August the Bitboys were back. This time with an updated Glaze3D specification that included every feature under the sun, including 9MB of embedded DRAM memory and four pixel pipelines capable of rendering 600Mpixels/sec and 1.2Gtexels/sec. In addition to this, the new chips could be connected in parallel to produce a phenomenal 1.2Gpixel/sec and 2.4Gtexel/sec. Was it merely a coincidence that this specification seemed to mirror many of the forthcoming features from NVIDIA and 3dfx. Would we ever see a Glaze3D chip? Don't hold your breath.
Can you believe it, in January 2000 the Bitboys were back again. Don't these guys know when to stay down! Having shelved their Glaze3D chip (surprise, surprise) they now announced their new XBA(TM) or Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture! Yeah right. By this time few were taking the Bitboys seriously, as demonstrated by the following press releases.
www.3dspotlight.com
www.somethingawful.com
If the Bitboys had ever done more than just PR this announcement might be cause for caring. You say they did a tech demo, great. Now so what?
"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.
"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"
You make it sound so simple. But it's not. What BB is doing is not "just widening the memory-bus". They actually move 12 megs of the ram ON THE DIE ITSELF. And that memory is on 1024bit memory-bus. For comparison, that four times as wide as on Radeon 9700 and Matrox Parhelia. That emdedded RAM is used for the things that require most bandwidth, namely the frame-buffer. Textures don't need alot of bandwidth, and they are located in the slower "traditional" RAM. Of course, if there's any eDRAM left, most used textures are stored there.
When it comes to PC 3D-accelerators, that IS pretty damn revolutionery!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.