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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."
That's PCI-X, not PCI-E. The rest of the stats are also a retro-blast as well.
I'm not sure what kind of architectures you could really test with this thing. It has slower memory on it than is on my motherboard. I honestly believe you could write software renderers faster than this thing.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Pci and pci-x is dieing
Not the point. The processor is not designed for that. You stuff microcode and data into it from the normal CPU and turn it loose, and it does its thing WAY faster than the normal CPU can. This thing has no disk IO and would not run well at all as a general purpose CPU. It's like trying to go grocery shopping with a Formula 1 car.
How are you going to emulate video cards that are undocumented enough to not even have existing open source drivers?
I'm not sure which choice you think should be obvious, but do you really think this graphics card is aimed at the gaming market, and if so, what gave you that idea?
Sure, it might be more expensive. But the point is, people who buy this are not just buying the hardware (yet). They are supporting the R&D these guys are doing, and enabling them to move closer to the production stage. It's an investment in future technology.
Frankly, I think this is great. Once they reach the stage of being able to compete with a low-end Nvidia/ATI on features and price, I would consider buying one. The cards could be optimised to work with whatever operating system you would be running on the machine, and would be guaranteed to have no driver compatibility issues.
I hope they are successful with this and can move into other areas. An open soundcard would also be very nice to have.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
At least, it doesn't appear to me that it would. The product page states that the thing is sold blank. Unprogrammed. Meaning it's not gonna run *anything* till someone programs the thing. Once someone codes it up to run OpenGL/Direct3D decently, maybe it could run 3D games OK; kinda hard to tell. The hardware in it appears to be top-notch, in terms of lots of high-speed ram. Can anyone give us any idea what kind of performance that FPGA can give?
It looks like, basically, this thing is a $1400 prototype that OEM's could use as the basis for a consumer video card.
Can someone out there who knows more about hardware design and fab than I do tell me - once someone has come up with decent programming for an FPGA, can non-programmable, cheaper, maybe even faster, chips be fabbed? I assume that is generally how the design process works - start with an expensive, programmable chip, get the firmware correct, then mass produce non-programmable chips that are much cheaper?
Kind of appropriate considering it's basically a graphics card designed by hobbyists, don't you think? I don't think a Virtex is the best choice, either: it uses a lot of power and has an onboard PowerPC core that wouldn't really be that useful. Any graphics card implemented on FPGAs will use a lot of power for relatively poor performance. To compete, you'll need enough orders to get your design fab'ed by TSMC or someone.
There is no way in hell these people can compete with ATI/NVIDIA. Have you ever been to NVIDIA? Do you have *any* idea how many really smart people they have working on these problems 60 hours a week?
This project would be so much better off reverse engineering Cuda to make an open source driver than trying to make their own graphics chip. Hell, even Intel is having a very hard time getting a high-end graphics chip to work, and they've got so many more resources than this project.
Open source software works because anyone can hack on it and produce comparable stuff with zero initial investment. Hardware does not work that way. There is just way too much of an initial investment required. Even with FPGAs it's too expensive, and you're way too far behind to start with.
These people are idiots to think they can succeed here unless one of them has a 90nm fab in his or her backyard. (Sorry -- this is qualitatively different than trying to write your own OS, which is done all the time in undergrad classes.)
The choice is indeed an easy one, because it doesn't exist. Prospective buyers would only ever be interested in one or the other; they don't serve the same purpose.
A Formula 1 car might not even be street legal, let alone comfortable for anything other than racing.
Right tool for the job, can't be said enough. Even CPUs have things like math coprocessors. It's no surprise that even if a video card technically can run Linux, it might not be very good at it. (A fair example: PS2 Linux.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Standard reply:
"If you aren't happy with this Open Source project, fork it and do something better."
If you're a hobbyist software/electronic person, the choice is pretty damn obvious. (games are boooooring anyways)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Altera's parts are good, and their tools are nicer than Xilinx's in many respects, but there's a fairly-massive catch. Their "free" Windows tool chain requires product activation. Meaning you have no assurance that you'll be able to maintain your project for the next several years. Your design dies when Altera says it dies.
So, um, yeah... Xilinx.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I think that "300" reference was meant to be funny.
"If you aren't happy with this Open Source project, buy a Radeon"
FTFY, HTH, HAND
After all, I am strangely colored.
>what could I do with something like this?
Let's see, XCS34000 has a peak gate equivalent of 4 million gates, figure 2 million effectively usable. Maybe a Geforce 256 (the original GeForce) if you're lucky.
>if I've never done any FPGA programming
If you don't know digital logic, forget it. There are tools that go from C like languages for FPGA programming (Celoxica, IIRC), but they cost more than 15 times what this board alone costs and it still requires knowledge of digital logic to use well.
By the way, you do know the ISE Foundation software from Xilinx to actually program this thing costs ~$3500, right? (The ~$2500 is without a simulator which you're going to want.)
>and not much 3-D graphics programming
Forget it x2. You'll be implementing your own floating point math units after all.
>could I have FUN with this thing?
Fun is in the eye of the beholder. As many people have pointed out already, better hardware is available for less.
If you really want totally open source drivers they'll be available for ATI cards in the not too distant future.
This graphics card when it finishes won't be "open source" because you won't be able to change it, it might have open specifications, and it might have a good relationship with the open source community, but the open source community is just as bad at maintaining a relationship with hardware vendors as hardware vendors are at maintaining a relationship with open source.
If you're willing to pay $1500 for your ideology that's your call, but I'd rather pay $500 and get a card that's substantially faster, and is actually programmed to do something other than diagnose itself and I don't really give a rats if the drivers are open or closed source.
It is a very sad statement of modern affairs when any kind of hack to your own hardware can be considered piracy.