Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S271165AbUJVCXr (ORCPT ); Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:23:47 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S271168AbUJVCU5 (ORCPT ); Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:20:57 -0400 Received: from c3p0.cc.swin.edu.au ([136.186.1.30]:10515 "EHLO swin.edu.au") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S271165AbUJVCSn (ORCPT ); Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:18:43 -0400 To: Greg Buchholz Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: Tim Connors Subject: Re: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable? In-reply-to: <20041021170808.GA675@sleepingsquirrel.org> References: <20041021170808.GA675@sleepingsquirrel.org> X-test-to: Greg Buchholz X-cc-to: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org X-reply-to-bofh-messageid: <2ROVu-7du-47@gated-at.bofh.it> X-Face: A>QmH)/u`[d}b.a5?Xq=L&d?Q}cF5x|wu#O_mAK83d(Tw,BjxX[}n4<13.e$"d!Gg(I%n8fL)I9fZ$0,8s3_5>iI]4c%FXg{CpVhuIuyI,W'!5Cl?5M,dL-*dHYs}K9=YQZCN-\2j1S>cU6XPXsQhz$x`M\ZEV}nPw'^jPc41FiwTQZ'g)xNK{2',](o5mrODBHe)) Message-ID: Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 12:18:23 +1000 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2380 Lines: 48 Greg Buchholz said on Thu, 21 Oct 2004 10:08:08 -0700: > Stephen Wille Padnos wrote: > >I guess I would look at this as an opportunity to make a "visual > >coprocessor", that also has the hardware necessary to output to a > >monitor (preferably multiple monitors). > > This idea is a step in the right direction. To make the project > viable, you might be better off trying to court a slightly different > audience (instead of the cost-sensitive/3D-performant market). What if > instead, you were selling a highly parallel reprogrammable computing > core, which also happened to do graphics? I could see a potentially > much bigger and higher profit margin market for a standardized interface > from Linux to an FPGA. Image people buying them for headless servers as > crypto accellerators. Or as DSP/FFT accellerators (for speech > recognition , MPEG compression, or whatever). I'm sure you'd sell a few > to grad students writing theses on data flow machines, parallel > languages, prime factorization etc. Heck, I'd buy one just because it'd > be cool to try and write a 1000 element merge sort in hardware that > completed in one or two clock cycles. It's not hard to imaging people > using it to speed up emulators like QEMU. Maybe the distributed > computing folks (Folding@Home, SETI) would also be interested, since > their work is already highly parallelizable. You get the idea. People would happily pay millions for this. Tim has probably heard of Grape? I don't know whether grape uses FPGAs or not, but take a look at the photo down the bottom of this: http://grape.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~fukushig/paper/sc96/sc96.html I reckon if we could put an accelarator card in each of our 200 new machines, that could be programmed on the fly to do N-body calculations, or then changed to do SPH, or whatever, and we only had to pay $500 per card, and it doubled performace, we'd do it in a second. Half the number of computers, drop energy consumption (and cooling), etc. It'd be great. -- TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/ A mouse is a device used to focus xterms. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/