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Glaze3D: Yet Another 3D Chipset
Dixie_Flatline writes "This chipset looks pretty cool to me. I'm suprised that it hasn't shown up on slashdot before now, based on it's immense hoopyness. And it's got Linux support...and it hasn't even been released yet. Go here. " Basically this thing claims to crush everything else on the market. If it makes for better games, I'm all for it.
Excuse me here, but chip design is nothing like game or demo design. They may be from the coolest demo scene ever, it does not mean squat. The two skill sets are entirely different, although extensive knowledge of graphics algorithms is a must for architects specifying/designing high level specs for graphics accelerators. Being a doctoral student with IC design experience, I can talk for hours on the difficulties and the financial burden associated with designing a 16-bit RISC processor, let alone a state-of-the-art graphics accelerator.
This sounds like a hoax to me, or a bunch of really hopeful kids with an impressive spec, but nothing else. I would have the following questions to any group venturing on their own to design and build their graphic accelerator without bundles of cash and/or experience:
-How will you pay for the design tools? EDA tools to compile the HDL design, place & route, simulate, etc. cost more than 100K per seat. It is nothing like grabbing gcc or egcs from the nearest Linux ftp site and starting coding..
-How will they prototype their chip? A graphics accelerator will not fit in most FPGAs, so even that cheapest prototyping method is out of the question. They will probably need to rent/acquire hardware emulators or have prototypes built, which cost a lot of $$$$.
-Then again, it doesn't only take a bunch of us geeks & 3D programming wizzes (plural of 'wiz', anyone?) to put a 3D chip on the market-you need hordes of suits for marketing, advertising and other stuff, too..They don't come in cheap.
With all due respect for Finnish technical talent(Nokia and of course Linus comes to mind), I believe they will fail miserably. If this is for real, that is.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
Okay, this text is based on the conversation I had last October with a friend of mine, who happened to be one of the Pyramid3D software developers at VLSI Solution. I have to emphasize that all opinions are his, and this is heavily from the P3D point of view, naturally. Unfortunately he is on holiday right now, and I just have to relay his views here.
Years ago Bitboys approached VLSI with the promise that they had designed a 3D-engine. When the money was assigned, it was found out that it was actually only code directly from some game, and had no any real definitions behind it. The actual P3D development was done by VLSI Solution, who had 20 people working on it full-time since 1995, for over three years. Bitboys were bought out of the project around 1997.
After Bitboys no longer worked with P3D, Glaze3D appeared out of nowhere. [I remember seeing mostly the same Glaze3D page on Bitboys web site way over a year ago. Now it only has two new images, and probably some revised specs.] A lot of Glaze3D's publicity material is actually from P3D demos, including some of the screenshots on the page. Even if there is something real now, in the beginning Bitboys were advertising technology that didn't exist with the demo material from completely another project.
In short: Glaze3D is most likely an illegal product that will probably never be released.
Pyramid3D does exist, and there are beta versions of the actual card. It was demoed at Assembly '97, IIRC, and in summer 1998 it was nearly completed. But as we know, TriTech dropped the project and P3D will never hit the shelves. There may be some P3D-based products, like inexpensive video converters, though. TriTech was supposed to do the marketing for P3D, but they actually never did anything else than host a webpage.
P3D would have had good 2D (300MHz RAMDAC), good 3D (probably not much chance against today's cards), and both video-in and video-out that support basically all usual formats (NTSC, PAL, SECAM) and their mutations. [I have seen some NTSC->PAL conversions done with P3D, very good quality for real-time conversion.] It was the first card to have ready DirectX6 drivers. Open source drivers for Linux/FreeBSD were also developed. The target price was $100 with 16MB RAM. And this was early 1998. What a pity.
Hope this clears some points about the relationship between Pyramid3D and Glaze3D.
-sph
That sounds really sweet, I'll keep my eyes open for when they actually ship something. Are they going to release full specs to the Mesa and XFree groups?
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Open mind, insert foot.
This is interesting, this group had a chip called the Pyramid3D a few years ago that never made it onto the market because its performance wasn't competative (although it did have a few neat features like antialiasing). Anyway, they say it won't be shipping until the first half of 2000, which could mean at least 6 months from now and likely more, and by then the performance their claimed 3x current performance may not seem as great, as TNT3 and who knows what else will be out before then. It could be another case of too little, too late.
Interestingly, they are using embedded DRAM, the same technology Rendition is supposedly using in their next-generation chip (if they ever release one).
Anyway, it looks like a cool chip, provided it has a robust OpenGL implementation for X.