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I’m struggling to understand what’s “free” here, did he design his own board and IC? Or just the software side?
by nolongerthere 3y ago
I’m struggling to understand what’s “free” here, did he design his own board and IC? Or just the software side?
- SushiHippie 3y agoFrom TFA: The FuryGPU is set to be open-sourced. “I am intending on open-sourcing the entire stack (PCB schematic/layout, all the HDL, Windows WDDM drivers, API runtime drivers, and Quake ported to use the API) at some point, but there are a number of legal issues,” Barrie wrote in a Hacker News post [0] on Wednesday. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836745
- nolongerthere 3y agoRight it’s those legal issues that I’m trying to understand, the article says he used off-the-shelf parts which usually means encumbrances. I initially thought this was like risc-v where he’d done ALL the work, which seemed insane, the amount of work it appears he did is also crazy for a single person to do. I was just curious on how much was his own.
- wildzzz 3y agoHe mentioned something about his job possibly being a hindrance to releasing everything as open source. This guy has been in the video game industry for a long time so there's a chance he does similar graphics work as a day job and there could be crossover technical details that his employer might take offense to. The hardware itself is just a Zynq Ultrascale+ module attached to a custom board, probably using reference designs from the various component manufacturers so I doubt there's an issue releasing that. Those Zynq modules are not cheap so this is still definitely a toy and not anything useful for everyday computing. You could buy a RTX 4060 Ti for probably less than the price of the entire FuryGPU hardware stack.