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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 :)
They're probably going to own 100% of the high-price videocard market with that.
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
Having recently taken a graduate class where I had to write my own shaders for OpenGL, it was neat to play with the video card on that level; however most cards are quite limited with what is open API.
This card, while too expensive for me, might spur some interesting projects - cypto stuff and Ray tracing come to mind. I hope someone does something great with this.
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!
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.
crypto cracking
Really? I have friends who splash out $1000s on their hobbies, whether it is robots or R/C. This is a steal in comparison to some more expensive and consuming hobbies, especially considering the (underpowered but still excellent) FPGA.
If graphics programming was my thing, I so would get one. I am considering getting one regardless, if only to use it for ray tracing.
Flexible hardware + Good open source ideals = excellent product
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
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...
How are you going to emulate video cards that are undocumented enough to not even have existing open source drivers?
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
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.)
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.
This sounds way more practical than the OpenGraphics thing. $1500 on top of having to find a PCI-X board? No thanks.
If you consider "ricejob" offensive, you need to step off the meta-racism bus. Would you prefer "horribly mutilated japanese-origin vehicle with weakly-bred owner" ?
Ricejob it is.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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