Slashdot Mirror
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?
Please be gentle! I found these in the forums
The future isn't what it used to be.
DNF will be the Pack-in.
:)
Guess you get to decide who's to blame for the holdup.
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.
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.
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!.
Bitboys are a hardware company that released several press releases 2-3 years ago touting there XBA architecture that had 20GB/s bandwidth. It was touted as the GeForce killer. Needless to say they never released anything besides press releases.
Q.
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.
"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!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
"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.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
"Who cares about this pathetic crap, NVIDIA and even ATI now will own them."
I remember when people talked about NVIDIA like that.... "Who cares about NVIDIA? 3Dfx will own them!"
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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. 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...
Try releasing press releases and demo's as early as 1996!
/.er really mentioned the poor track record and the hype. Its just that.
Infact I remember reading an old maximumpc article stating that the bitzboy's vodoo2 killer was doing a demo at 25fps while the vodoo2 was doing it at 45fps. Its no longer online so I can not link it since this was way back in 1997. After the hype their demo never performed and never was produced.
I judge them with a grain of salt. I am glad I am not an investor since they actually never made a single sale in 6 years! My guess is either vodoo or Nvidia keep coming out with a supperior technology and they decided not to ship and start over with yet another design.
I am very skeptic if this chip is the killer chip. Mark my words if the geforce5 is better then you can kiss this vaporware goodbye. I am supprised only one
http://saveie6.com/
Besides, if you send the design to Altera, they can manufacture a whole bunch of Asics for you. In theory... whether the resulting ASIC would be fast enough is unclear. (Doubt it.)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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!!"
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?
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...
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?
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
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.
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.