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Bitboys Silicon Sighted

Posted by timothy on from the plus-cold-fusion-in-your-microwave dept.

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? ;)"

2 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Re:NOT XBA! Display accelerator for mobile devices by Jade+E.+2 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The demonstration and presentation was about their new display acceleration solution for mobile devices...

    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 PLD. The memory chips on the back are Altera EPC SRAM 'configuration devices'. That means it's got between ~400,000 and 1,051,648 gates, not 20-30k.

    While I can't fault them for writing a program that does everything you mentioned for this particular PLD, it's definitely not as impressive as they lead you to believe, and I don't see how this is 'their' silicon at all. The other card, I can't comment on, since it didn't actually do anything. (But we all know that a reputable company like Bitboys is far above faking a demo, right?)

  2. Yahaya by Konster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!.