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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?
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.
"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 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
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"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.
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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...
"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!
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- Hype!
- Actually produce a product.
- Profit!
This, for the Bitboys, was the turning point.