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>> Afterburner is a hardware accelerator card built with an FPGA, or programmable ASIC. With over a million logic cells, it can process up to 6.3 billion pixels
by mrtnmcc 6y ago
>> Afterburner is a hardware accelerator card built with an FPGA, or programmable ASIC. With over a million logic cells, it can process up to 6.3 billion pixels per second.
Interesting -- didn't realize FPGAs were commonly used in graphics development flows. Does anyone know what software is used to customize the FPGA to accelerate tasks in macOS?
- monocasa 6y agoIt's not used often. It's a one off thing for Apple. And I don't think you as the end user or third party programmer are given any options to customize it.
- SllX 6y agoIt’s programmed to function as a ProRes and ProRes RAW video accelerator, so is more useful for video production. Apple has it locked down though, so while they can update it, 3rd party devs would have to find a way to hack it to do anything useful with it, and I’m not sure how appealing a target the Afterburner is with other FPGAs around.
- kevingadd 6y agoDoesn't really count as 'an FPGA', how it's implemented is really a minor detail. Lots of consumer and prosumer hardware out there is based on FPGAs, but programming it isn't something you're allowed to do. At least two pieces of hardware hooked up to my PC are powered by FPGAs. Part of the logic here is that if you're only gonna sell 20000 units, it's probably better to just slap an FPGA in there than build out a fully custom board with a bunch of dedicated chips. The FPGA is easier to update after release, too.
- julienfr112 6y agoI'm interested. What are the two pieces of hardware you are talking about ?
- kevingadd 6y agoVideo capture hardware and audio interface