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? ;)"

Comments

hi-res pictures

[MiTEG]

Please be gentle! I found these in the forums

NOT XBA! Display accelerator for mobile devices

[Petteri Kangaslampi]

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.

Re:NOT XBA! Display accelerator for mobile devices

[Petteri Kangaslampi]

The chip was very clearly marked, it's an Altera APEX EP20K400C ... That means it's got between ~400,000 and 1,051,648 gates, not 20-30k.

Yeah, well, the 20-30k figure was from their presentation (might have been 22k, don't remember exactly). Nothing forces you to use everything on the chip... Obviously we have no way of checking the claims, but I don't think they have a big reason to give misinformation in that area. The people they need to convince are the mobile device manufacturers, not a bunch of demo coders.

There is no "their" silicon for the mobile accelerator in the usual sense of having an NVidia chip. There probably never will be either -- something like this would be integrated into existing silicon in a device, not put into a separate chip. If you open a modern mobile phone, you don't find separate CPUs, DSPs etc, everything that can be intergated is.

Having said that, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the first device with this graphics hardware to ship... The Bitboys don't exactly have a stunning track record in that area. :-)

Re:NOT XBA! Display accelerator for mobile devices

[udif]

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.

You shouldn't believe everything you're told. The chip was very clearly marked, it's an Altera APEX EP20K400C [altera.com] PLD. The memory chips on the back are Altera EPC SRAM 'configuration devices' [altera.com]. That means it's got between ~400,000 and 1,051,648 [altera.com] gates, not 20-30k.

Just to set the records straight:

When counting gates, FPGA are inherently less efficient that ASIC or full-custom chip, due to the FPGA's fixed structure. A logic design that may take 400,000 gates in an FPGA may fit into 40,000 ASIC gates. This is normal. The fact that ALTERA calls this device a 400,000 gate device doesn't mean it actually is. This is a hard to measure number, just like performance benchmarks.

FPGA's are usually left at 50%-60% utilization if you want to be able to get any decent speed out of them. if you start filling them, routing becomes harder, and the speed drops.

Remember that this is a general purpose prototyping board. They may use a larger device not because they need it but because it allows them more freedom while designing.

Summary: The fact that they use an FPGA that is characterized by it's manufacturer as a 400,000 gate device doesn't mean their graphics core won't fit into 22,000 ASIC gates.

Re:Why this is news

[NeMon'ess]

Looks to me like bitboys' place is history will lie here.

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 /// Bitboys Pyramid3DFigure 4.7 /// TriTech Pyramid 3D

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 /// No.9 Ticket to Ride IV

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?