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Kickstarter For Open Source GPU
First time accepted submitter eekee writes "The targets are high, but so is the goal: releasing Verilog source code for a GPU implementation. The source will be open source, LGPL-licensed, and suitable for loading onto an FPGA. The first target is for a 2D GPU with PCI interface; perhaps not terribly interesting in itself, but the first stretch goal is much more exciting: full OpenGL and Direct3D graphics."
Unlike the Open Graphics Project, this is starting from a working 2D accelerator and mostly working 3D accelerator cloning the features of the Number Nine Ticket to Ride hardware. If they get a meelion bucks they'll overhaul the chip to support something other than PCI (although you can bridge between PCI and PCIe) and implement a modern programmable rather than fixed-function chip. Also unlike OGP, they do not appear interested in producing hardware, instead focusing entirely on the core itself for use in FPGAs (anyone want to dust off the OGD1 design?)
How is this not an Ouya in the making? Is there actually a market large enough for this thing to do anything but vanish without a trace?
Apologies for the negativity. Please do correct my world view. I'm amenable.
A lot tougher to get right than software. In software you can implement anything you want, as badly as you want. It doesn't cost anything and it's easy to start over. So what if you have an open source GPU? How are you going to connect it to the computer? You need an above-hobbyist PCB designer (sorry, it's true), you need someone to build the boards, test them, solder on the parts (assuming you were able to make a schematic and a BOM and order the parts), test again, and then you can start debugging software as maybe hardware bugs come out at the same time.
But at least make something that can be fabbed. MIPS and ARM are doing great with implementing reference designs.
Heck, I'd *love* a Chinese factory to take an open graphics card spec and crank out $9 low-power cards for me to use in a server. PCI is fine, but it kills me to put a $50 GeForce card with a heatsink and fan in a normally headless machine!
FPGA is a great target for distributed development; just support those who want to implement it in an an ASIC.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
With the rise of ARM, SoC parts with fully open GPU APIs of amazing power are essentially almost ZERO cost. Tiny circuit boards are available for experimenters and developers with first class 2D, 3D, Video and JPG acceleration, and even video ENCODING is becoming a common hardware feature in low-end parts.
Care to name any? Most of the ones I've heard of with any form of acceleration are using a proprietary GPU core, where you get a binary blob for Android and bugger-all else. Maybe things have changed since, but last I hard the driver situation was worse for ARM cores than it was in the PC space. Indeed, that was the rationale behind Mir - that it would be able to use the Android blobs under Ubuntu.
People who fetishize the term "open source" almost to the point of religion.
These guys have licenses covering the original #9 tech that was sold to S3.
The are former #9 engineers, not as you say non-too-bright fiddlers.
"By mid 2000, S3 had completed the acquisition of Number Nine's assets and Number Nine had ceased operations. In 2002, two former Number Nine engineers, James Macleod and Francis Bruno, formed Silicon Spectrum, Inc., and licensed Number Nine's graphics technology from S3 to implement in FPGA devices."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Nine_Visual_Technology#Number_Nine_Video_Cards_using_Number_Nine_GPUs
"Rather than trying to start from scratch, Silicon Spectrum licensed the same graphics technology that we had developed for Number Nine and optimized it for use in an FPGA. During that same period, both Altera and Xilinx introduced cost effective low priced FPGA chips which we could fit our design into which turned a former high end PC graphics accelerator into a lower cost solution."
http://www.siliconspectrum.com/overview.htm
Open reference designs are invaluable.. they allow integration of this into an existing design or SoC, but more interestingly, provide an easy platform to customize at the hardware level.
..don't panic
None of the GPUs in current ARM SoCs are open in any sense of the word.
Some of them are getting painfully reversed engineered open source drivers - Lima (for Mali), Grate (for Tegra), etc. But the hardware and firmware is still closed source.
This isn't about getting cheap hardware en-masse. It's about getting fully open source hardware at any cost. And the market for that (from a user perspective) is quite small, although the benefits for FPGA computer projects could be massive - essentially a free GPU if this gets funded.
I don't see a problem with patents for anything but the new functionality on the $1m bounty - this is all proven pre-existing hardware being open sourced at the Verilog level.
This will need some major backing from the open source extremists to get funded.
I would prefer OpenCL-only chip, for massively parallel computations. I would like some really simple CPU, like MC68000 + vector FPU, with some 128KB of private memory for each core, with thousands of cores, working on 3GHz or more. It would be even better, if cores are setup in 2D grid, so that each core can access private memory of neighbouring 4 cores.