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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? ;)"
Does anyone else notice how much that looks like an FPGA at the center of the board?
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. =)
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.
I don't understand. If this is targetted at crappy PDA and mobile phone displays, why does it need such insane resolution and bandwidth?
They should be concentrating on getting hardware Transform & Lighting running so as to relieve the relatively slow CPU's on those devices of transforming all of those polygons.
However, some of the photo's referenced in the original article definitely show some kind of hardware driving a PDA-resolution LCD, so I guess that truly is their target environment.
www.sjbaker.org
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.
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...