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This is really interesting, I have been following the project on OSnews since its inception.

What struck me as pretty cool was the idea the board could also be used for audio etc. Neat!

Although today it might look like we have plenty of options regarding hardware with open drivers, just a few short years ago basically none of the big players supported FLOSS community.

Otherwise, I don't see people coding drivers for $800 hardware that probably has about the same performance as a Radeon 9600, twice its power consumption, and less than a thousandth of its user base. Nice project, though.

It's not too powerful, indeed, but it was never even meant to be. The whole point of OGD1 is that you can customize ANY part of it as you see fit with detailed instructions as to how to do it and all, and as such it's an absolutely fantastic piece of hardware for anyone who is genuinely interested in hardware development as opposed to software development, and it could f.ex. be hugely useful to engineering students et al.

I personally wouldn't know what to do with OGD1, but hey, I don't belong in the target audience anyway. And from what I've seen at offer elsewhere it seems very competitive compared to other similar products, both performance- and pricewise, not to mention it being completely open and as such allowing for larger amount of cooperation and experimentation between the developers.

I agree, emulator support would be nice. I also think Radeon 9600 performance is a pipe dream.

However, it still has a lot of value for people, like me. It was really frustrating writing embedded software that controlled everything at a low level, but I couldn't touch the code that ran on the FPGA out of verilog ignorance. I did identify a couple of bugs in the FPGA implementation, but we had to contract out that work to the author of the original code and convince him that the bug was real.

FPGA = field programmable gate array. A special kind of chip that can be programmed. However, unlike a CPU, you don't program a sequence of instructions, but rather a set of parallel interconnected data processing units that compute boolean logic functions. The programming model is very much like designing a custom chip, so programming these things is very much considered "hardware design" - and in fact, an FPGA configuration (i.e. the "software for it) can be turned into a real chip with a fair amount of work.

Then I was wrong for the 'G'. That's why I hate guessing.

Sorry, wrong again, you were on the right track the first time. ;-)

Here's my understanding of their situation:   The Open Graphics project wants to build a graphics card, but the fabrication is insanely expensive.   They built a flexible board that, from the spec's, can do graphics.   (See also, "late binding" in the context of computer programming languages.)

The financial reasoning is that they can sell these boards to any tinkerer, student, or even a professional hardware engineer.   Not to ignore video performance that's now merely acceptable, it's so much more than a video card that they will cover their costs when (I hope) people soak them up as fast as they're made.   We need more stuff like this for hobbyists to disrupt the market.

It looks like a reproductible behavior from Intel that once a standard starts to be properly documented on the internet, it's replaced by a new one which isn't.

Go and figure out why hardware support is so poor in hobby OSs...

Edited 2010-06-24 14:57 UTC

The main purpose behind OGD1 is to provide a platform for developing a "real GPU."

Now, a "real GPU" contains dozens to hundreds of small parallel stream processor cores. GPUs actually have more transistors than CPUs to fit on all this hardware.

Also, we are developing a "real GPU", and we have a spec for it. If you're interested, join the mailing list and help us out.

Lastly, to fabricate a run of "real GPUs" would cost millions of dollars. That's just manufacturing. Forget design, which you can't pull out of your arse either, and for that, we need manpower.

No, OGD1 itself is not intended for most end users. Hobbyists who want to do FPGA development would find it useful for lots of things, and THEY are "end users" in that domain. But most people are not chip designers. OGD1's purpose is to provide chip designers with a platform they can use to develop (prototype) products that can be turned into end-user products.

Hardware vendors typically only open up specs when they're pressured to, sometimes by market demand, and sometimes by the strong arm of people like Theo de Raadt who somehow manages to be able to influence stock prices. Personally, I have no interest in fighting with these companies. They have their business, and we FOSS enthusiasts are like a bunch of annoying flies interfering with their primary purpose, which is to make profit and lock in customers so they can make more profit.

What I really want to do is develop hardware that is friendly to free software from the outset. This way, there is no fight. Just science and engineering.

I have nothing against capitalism and business. I think good money could be made from open hardware, if we could only get enough starting capital to get the ball rolling. But I'm more motivated by solving problems than just making money for its own sake. I'm more interested in community than my own profit margin. And if I did find myself able to make an income from this, I would be happiest if a lot of other enthusiasts were making an income from it right along with me.