Nice move. But some more details are missing. No where they mentioned about the GLSL compiler for shaders. Are they providing it or we need to develop our own?
It's a fixed-function hardware, so no shaders and no GLSL compilers.
Open-Source Graphics Processor
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Open-Source Graphics Processor
#42Nice move. But some more details are missing. No where they mentioned about the GLSL compiler for shaders. Are they providing it or we need to develop our own?
Only the $1M strech goal would even support shaders, the basic 3D option is just a fixed pipeline.
And way down at the bottom it says: >Software drivers are a challenge, and we will work on providing some level of drivers, with the hopes that the community takes them up and pushes them to new levels and provides problem reports to us.
Re: Open-Source Graphics Processor
#43I wish people wouldn't use the LGPL for "hardware" without a legal opinion from the FSF. I mean what is "linking" for verilog code? - it does not fit the model. The intentions are fine but the mechanisms need work.
I don't know that the FSF has to say but I can easily imagine what the LGPL would mean in the context of hardware IPs: if you modify the core of the IP in any way you have to share the code. However the rest of the hardware that interacts through the documented interface or ports of the IP (that would be the "linked" part) is not subject to the license.
Modern ASICs are built around blocks connected by a system bus so it's actually quite a clear cut.
Re: Open-Source Graphics Processor
#44I think they are approaching the marketing from a wrong direction. Instead of targeting PC/opensource enthusiasts, they should be targeting the growing "maker" segment. Have a FPGA board as a backer reward, and demo it using a microcontroller. That way all the limitations spawning from a 15 year old GPU core do not matter that much when there aren't really many competitors.
There are existing projects to squirt out a VGA and talk to a microcontroller. Most have an "interesting" reputation for bugs.
At the really low end a sufficiently hacked up PIC (even the older ones) can bit bang out NTSC composite B/W video, crazy as that probably sounds. You can compute during the retrace intervals. So thats the $2 market.
One of the most successful / popular / bug free uses of the Propeller chip is as a graphics coprocessor outputting analog VGA, it does quite a good job of that. The electronics for the prop-vga connection are some peculiar value resistors, and a VGA jack, little else. So thats the $10 market.
If you want something more advanced than a prop as a graphics copro, you use a $25 rasp-pi.
Much above $25 and you're looking at little embedded PCs/home theater PCs. Look at what the mythtv guys are using for frontends, which over the last decade or so has gone from pretty exotic to boring COTS, for a couple hundred $.
So its a market that's fuller than you know and has had historical issues.
To some extent you run into problems with "maker" class processors such as memory limitations. If you want monochrome full VGA and your arduino only has 2 K of ram or whatever it is (its probably 2 ords magnitude too low whatever the exact spec is) you're not going to be doing a simple frame buffer. And if you hack a rasp-pi into being your graphic copro, then other than I/O limitations there seems to be no point in making an arduino the "main" processor if the rasp-pi is doing all the work.
Re: Open-Source Graphics Processor
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
>- seems to be based on 2000-era technology Could you elaborate?
The goal is to produce a re-implementation of the #9 Ticket to Ride IV card ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Nine_Visual_Technology ) which is a fixed-function graphics card released in 1998. As they say in the first paragraph, "The reason behind this was to provide a binary compatible graphics core for vertical markets: Medical Imaging, Military, Industrial, and Server products." This is not something that wil…
I missed the 'history' paragraph. I remember the glorious #9 days. But this is so old I'm thinking it would be easier to have virtual driver translation. Even with overhead a phone gpu could outperform easily.
Re: Open-Source Graphics Processor
#46OK I'm missing this completely. What problem is this solving ? I can't believe they have never seen a smartphone recently, so they know what cheapo hardware is capable of pushing nowadays. Yet this exists. So what is it that is exiting here but fly high over my head ?
Acquire any number of FPGA dev boards with a video output. They're not expensive. Then go to opencores.org and browse freely available cores for seemingly everything ... except 3d graphics cores. Theres quite a few implementations of crude VGA framebuffer out, this is a stereotypical Uni-level FPGA class lab exercise (its not terribly hard). There are some opencore projects trying to accelerate graphics but not as much as you'd think. And there's nothing like the thing in the kickstarter.
I hope the kickstarter project is Wishbone compatible so it can talk to any CPU core I'd like to synth and they're not just making a computer card or whatever, and I hope it ends up license compatible with opencores.
The lack of accelerated graphics is a kind of a weird hole in free FPGA tech, everything else you can imagine seems available.
So for example if I wanted to make an ethernet connected stepper motor controlling FPGA based CNC machine controller, which is not so far fetched, every major software component is off the shelf at opencores except for the software I'd write for the synthesized CPU and ... accelerated graphics if I want a 3-d pix of what the machine is doing / done / plan to do. All the rest, CPU cores, ethernet, stepper drivers, PS/2 drivers for keyboard mouse, all thats off the shelf. It would of course be cheaper to use a COTS desktop PC or a rasp-pi but the point is if I wanted to use a FPGA I almost could except for no 3-d graphics.
Re: Open-Source Graphics Processor
#47Interesting 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.
Something like Larrabee?
Re: Open-Source Graphics Processor
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
>- seems to be based on 2000-era technology Could you elaborate?
The goal is to produce a re-implementation of the #9 Ticket to Ride IV card ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Nine_Visual_Technology ) which is a fixed-function graphics card released in 1998. As they say in the first paragraph, "The reason behind this was to provide a binary compatible graphics core for vertical markets: Medical Imaging, Military, Industrial, and Server products." This is not something that wil…
You've got it. The $200k level gives you a 2D graphics card from 1998. It looks like their original target market was people who want an embedded emulation of this sort of ancient system so they can run DOS, Windows 95, or ancient Linux/X11 on it. Markets in which changing the software is horribly expensive due to compliance costs.
The $400k goal targets Direct3D 8. That appears to date to about 2000: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/directx-an...
(I'm impressed that article is still up from 2000!)
$1m is not totally unreasonable for the shader-based design at commercial rates. Last time I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for a shader-capable fully open graphics card delivering working silicon, I came up with two years, $2.5m, and a hiring shortlist.
Re: Open-Source Graphics Processor
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is not going to work without a card as a reward.
The problem is making an ASIC and going to production will cost much, much, much more than 200k$. 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 s…
They could ship an FPGA card, although backers would probably get sticker shock at paying ~$1,000 for a 1998 graphics card.
Re: Open-Source Graphics Processor
#50I think they are approaching the marketing from a wrong direction. Instead of targeting PC/opensource enthusiasts, they should be targeting the growing "maker" segment. Have a FPGA board as a backer reward, and demo it using a microcontroller. That way all the limitations spawning from a 15 year old GPU core do not matter that much when there aren't really many competitors.
There are existing projects to squirt out a VGA and talk to a microcontroller. Most have an "interesting" reputation for bugs. At the really low end a sufficiently hacked up PIC (even the older ones) can bit bang out NTSC composite B/W video, crazy as that probably sounds. You can compute during the retrace intervals. So thats the $2 market. One of the most successful / popular / bug free uses of the Propeller chip i…
The Raspberry Pi is basically a GPU with an ARM in a tiny corner of the die. However, the GPU side of its behaviour is mostly Broadcom trade secrets. This produces outrage from some people who demand a completely open platform. However, I don't think there's enough demand money to produce one; and you may run into IP licensing issues, e.g. if you want to include an MPEG accelerator.