The Open Graphics Project is dedicated to producing open-architecture graphics hardware that is friendly to free and open source operating systems like Linux and BSD. Yesterday morning, they released schematics for OGD1 for public review and critique. OGD1 is an FPGA-based development and prototyping platform that they decided to turn into a commercial product to raise funds. Check out an article on KernelTrap. The release of these schematics was accompanied by a discussion about how to price the OGD1 to maximize fund-raising while keeping it accessible to hobbyists; KernelTrap has another article about that as well.
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Member since:2005-07-08
Rayiner
I read enough to see that the $1M ASIC is a far off proposition and that they did seem to know something about graphics. I didn't get the impression that the PCI core was complete at all.
Getting functional PCI core running is non trivial, you can get them up and running so so on your own system with incomplete features but the tricky part comes from having the board work in everyone else's system with other boards plugged in to mess up the timing. Search for PCI discussion on comp.arch.fpga yourself. I have also worked with folks that did PCI cores going back to the very first one for DEC.
The Lattice situation maybe different from Xilinx, Lattice maybe easier since they came in later, might already be supported onboard the FPGA. Which still brings me back to choosing a vendor that is tiny compared to Xilinx and that leaves most of my previous comments intact.
If I were interested in exploring graphics development I would look for a board that has already shipped & developed commercially with tools and support. But for graphics I haven't really seen anything that looks right, if its affordable, the output is too low rez and no PCI etc.
Also these boards don't seem to stay around very long either which makes long term development a problem. The FPGAs are really moving along very quickly these days hence the dependancy on commercial tools.
There was an interesting FPGA graphics board done in Germany (U Mannheim?) some time back, even got mentioned her. They showed that FPGA graphics done in hardware can be competetive to nVidia for some things by being smarter about the algorithm, lost the link though.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I think you probably didn't look very hard into the project.
1) They're not trying to rummage $1m right now for the ASIC. They're planning on selling FPGAs until they can decide whether an ASIC is a profitable proposition.
2) They already have a functional PCI core running on a Lattice FPGA.
3) The people behind the project work at a company that makes graphics chips. I'd wager they at least know what they're doing regarding graphics.