Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Wed 23rd Jun 2010 06:23 UTC

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RE: What about a real GPU?
by theosib on Thu 24th Jun 2010 14:02
in reply to "What about a real GPU?"
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.
RE[2]: What about a real GPU?
by fithisux on Thu 24th Jun 2010 16:58
in reply to "RE: What about a real GPU?"
Member since:
2006-03-27
Instead of this, why didn't they design a real GPU in an open source fashion?
This thing will never reach the hands of anyone who isn't an hardware designer, and won't definitively be of any help to open up the hardware market. A real GPU instead could be manufactured by any silicon fab with its own customizations.
Back at school we were busy designing our own electronics circuits, drawing the schematics with OrCAD, and print to real PCBs. But we couldn't go beyond very simple digital appliances, because of lack of time and knowledge - both limits which can be overcome with the power of open source.
I would love to go to a website, download the schematics of, say, a USB sound card, customize it, have the PCB printed by a local company for a few bucks, and solder the parts on it.
Extend this to microchips and your open hardware is served - I can't see a local company manufacture a single microchip for me for a few bucks in the foreseeable future, but at least they could offer a large choice of them.