Open-Source Graphics Processor

Interesting idea - rather than supporting OpenGL and Direct3D, I'd like to see a card that abandons them in favor of a better thought-out API (i.e. general purpose calculation on arbitrarily-sized buffers with arbitrary dimensions and an arbitrary amount of "channels" (or vector/matrix components)). Regardless, I backed it.

If you're a company you can already license plenty of GPU IPs for use in your SoC (in RTL form or otherwise).

If you look at the various tiers of this kickstarter you can see you'll have to go up to 600k$ to fund a proper ARM SoC 3D IP with AXI support. And since it's a kickstarter you have absolutely no way of knowing what the end product will look like.

I can't imagine any company betting that much money for RTL code with absolutely no warranty about what the end result will look like and if it's going to even fit in your SoC.

And the code being open source is actually not an advantage since it means all other constructors can then integrate the same GPU in their designs for free.

If it gets funded and it ends up working correctly I'm sure many companies will be interested to try and use it in their designs but I really doubt they'd fund it.

Based on what little I do know about GPUs, it seems to me that they are aiming for a hardware-fixed pipeline as a first step, and want to move towards general shader based architecture only as a very-very stretched goal. Am I right? If I see it right what is the reason for that? Couldn't they just jump to a modern architecture, instead of following the evolution of the industry? Excuse me for my ignorance, it's possible that even my assumptions are wrong.

How will this be different than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project which had some promise and then faded into the sunset?

The problem is making an ASIC and going to production will cost much, much, much more than 200k$. At that price you pay for one batch of MPW.

The only way they could do that is if they knew they could market their GPU to a broader audience and sell many units. The problem is I don't see who could be interested in buying a low-perf stand-alone PCI GPU which may very well end up costing more than a TegraII due to the small number of units.