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Open Source Graphics Card Available For Advance Orders
mollyhackit writes "The Open Graphics Project, which we've been following since it first started looking for experts four years ago, has just announced that the OGD1 is available for preorder now. The design features 2 DVI, 256MB RAM, PCI-X, and a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA along with a nonvolatile FPGA for programming on boot. FPGAs are reprogrammable hardware which means the graphics card can be optimized for specific tasks and execute them faster than a general purpose CPU. The card could be programmed for certain codecs to speed up encoding or decoding. An open hardware design means potential for better driver support. Of course you could always use the FPGA for something else... say crypto cracking."
The SPARTAN 3 is a hobbyist FPGA. Cheap, and a lot of gates, but slow. A Virtex 4 would've been nicer :)
At this stage of their development.
This is not a finished product by any stretch of the imagination. These are prototypes. Back in the day prototypes were wirewrapped nightmares and they cost a lot more than $1500!
you might be getting ripped off if you're paying $1500 for a Spartan-3 board.
I guess they don't really have the board volume to get low prices. But If you want a graphics card for $1500 that's probably less functional than an NVidia commodity card, I'm not gonna stop you.
OTOH, If you're interested in FPGA programming and a novice at it, you'll want to get a MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper Spartan board (like 50 to 150). See http://digilentinc.com/ for good starter boards.
If you're serious about FPGA programming (or just willing to pay $1500 to $3000) you will definitely want to get a board with a Virtex or Stratix on board:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML501-UNI-G.htm
If you want to have it on PCIx:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML555-G.htm
You can also get FPGAs socketted for AMD's Hypertransport bus and Intel's FSB:
http://xtremedatainc.com/ (Altera FPGAs)
http://drccomputer.com/ (Xilinx FPGAs)
http://nallatech.com/
http://celoxica.com/
(some of these vendors also sell PCI solutions)
FPGA programming environments still mostly suck. it's a market impeded by proprietary standards and a whole lot of NP-Hard algorithms. We're working on it...
There are two entries in the FAQ about this. Short answer is "PCI is more popular with users of FPGA kits" and "PCI-X is backward compatible with your 32-bit 33MHz PCI slots".
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
Yup... price of a nice GeForce and the time it takes to hack the identifier as described here.
Nah there are lots of other FPGA boards availible many of which are frankly a much better deal than this board.
Essentilly if you don't want the card for graphics what you get is a relatively small FPGA (one of the smaller members of the spartan 3 family which is xilinx's current low end family) on a PCI-X card. This board is way overpriced for that.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
There are literally thousands of FPGA prototyping boards on the market, many of which cost much less than this one. So while you could use this for other things, I can't imagine why anyone would spend the extra money unless they wanted to use the video specific features like the dual DVI interface. Furthermore, the purpose of the project is to develop an open source video card, and this card was created as a tool for those developers to experiment with.
So, it was created to prototype a video card, and it's only practical uses are real-time video (output) processing, thus it is a video card.
No you can't. If you had the info to emulate you could write a driver, and probably a lot easier.
This is a research & development tool for designing hardware or for use in highly specialized applications.
If you can find an FPGA for which there are open-source development tools, by all means please let us know about it. Meanwhile those of us that want to get actual work done with FPGAs will make do with the closed-source tools.
People routinely appear in comp.arch.fpga saying that they will write open-source FPGA development software, but none have succeeded at that yet. Perhaps the underestimate the magnitude of the problem. Xilinx has literally thousands of man years invested into developing their tools; it's not something for which one person or a small team can knock out a functional replacement in a year or two.
I try to use open-source software as much as possible, and I release much of the software I write in my spare time under the GPL, but for certain problems, open-source software just isn't going to be practical in the near term.
This product needs to be realized on PCI-E, other wise it'll just be a hobbyist item that will never become anyting more.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
While Project VGA does look very interesting (and much more practical than this particular project), I have to point out that PCI-X is almost always inherently compatible with PCI, and vice-versa. In this case, the manufacturer specifically states that it will work in a PCI slot. If you're having trouble finding a PCI motherboard, then maybe you're doing it wrong.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
The FPGA performance with the basic GPU would be enough to have a glitch free experience when using a 3Ddesktop in linux using the card acceleration or playing some old game. The thing is,the FPGA is probably going to run near 100MHz with 1 or 2 fixed pipeline so the performance will be ok for a desktop and stuff. For the latest game the framerate isn't going to be acceptable.
Once the design is finalized it's going to be ported as a chip. The initial production cost for fabbing a chip is near 1 or 2 million for about 100k unit. Once the chip is fabbed the unit cost drop dramatically. Using that final chip you can save a lot because you need a simpler board and less component than the development board.
Also once fabbed the chip is going to have more pixel pipeline and will be running a lot faster.Why more pixel pipeline and faster? A fabbed chip is more efficient than a FPGA both in term of surface usage and performance because of the way the circuit is made. So it allow the developer to use a maximum of surface. Since rendering graphics is a highly parallel task the graphics pipeline is easy to duplicate. Also usually in most design today the chip size is more dictated by the IO density than the core so there always space to add more pipeline.
The Tachikomas in Ghost in the Shell were all rendered with a software shader that makes them look hand-drawn. That type of specialized shader certainly seems like a great application for this.
Don't! and I'd say that to anyone. What they are offering is a FPGA dev kit, with nothing to put on the FPGA. Yes, they've done a board design, but that's really one of the easiest bits, especially as most firms that sell the chips give you sample designs that you can stitch together.
The HDL is the key to this project, and as far as I can see they haven't produced anything beyond very basic PCI and Memory Controllers (which I'd expect to be very low performance). I looked at the same code about 2 years ago (maybe more) and it's in exactly the same state now as it was then. I say this as someone who writes VHDL / Verilog for a living and was wondering if I should contribute, but I'm not interested in carrying the whole thing myself.
If this projects manages to get a framebuffer device up and running within 5 years I'll be impressed. I think the whole project is incredibly naive, and doesn't understand the scale of the project they're trying to do
sorry I misread the comparision table (mixed up the 400 and the 4000).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Yes, it MAY become graphics card, for example when they finally develop framebuffer logic (to act as card without acceleration). Then they plan to make vga emulation, so you could boot your computer with this card. You can read more in their FAQ
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
The original post was misleading. This is not a video card, but an FPGA development platform that has some video output capability.
:o)
The developers must be cursing slashdot at the moment
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Just to let you know (and because I'm a pedant ;) ) it's spelled "dearth", and it means "lack of" or "not large enough supply of".
:)
Basically, you said exactly the opposite of what you were trying to say
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The FPGA card is NOT intended to compete with ATI and Nvidia. My understanding is that even the eventual ASIC version isn't intended to compete with the high-end cards.