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OK 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

by gutnor 13y ago

OK 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 ?

pjc50 13y ago
The demand from a comparitively small number of people for the hardware to be open.
VLM 13y ago
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.
- rjsw 13y ago
  There is a project [1] on opencores.org that probably should be in the "Video Controller" category, I haven't tried using it yet though. [1] http://opencores.org/project,orsoc_graphics_accelerator http://opencores.org/project,orsoc_graphics_accelerator
jahagirdar 13y ago
There is a market for hardware that has gone out of production. Consider a hospital with a million dollar work of scanner which was the latest tech on 2000. Today due to the effect of bath tub curve some parts are failing. (e.g. GPU in this case) the original silicon manufacturer has either gone out of business or stopped production. The hospital now has the option of either putting down the money for a new scanner or buying a third party replacement GPU(pin and functionality compatible drop-in) at a premium (What would have cost 10-20$ can be sold for 1k-10k$) We do not need to fabricate a Y2K technology on the latest 16nm/28nm process. you can shop around to find the cheapest available process and use it.

by gutnor 13y ago

pjc50 13y ago

The demand from a comparitively small number of people for the hardware to be open.

VLM 13y ago

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.

rjsw 13y ago
There is a project [1] on opencores.org that probably should be in the "Video Controller" category, I haven't tried using it yet though. [1] http://opencores.org/project,orsoc_graphics_accelerator http://opencores.org/project,orsoc_graphics_accelerator

jahagirdar 13y ago

There is a market for hardware that has gone out of production. Consider a hospital with a million dollar work of scanner which was the latest tech on 2000. Today due to the effect of bath tub curve some parts are failing. (e.g. GPU in this case) the original silicon manufacturer has either gone out of business or stopped production. The hospital now has the option of either putting down the money for a new scanner or buying a third party replacement GPU(pin and functionality compatible drop-in) at a premium (What would have cost 10-20$ can be sold for 1k-10k$) We do not need to fabricate a Y2K technology on the latest 16nm/28nm process. you can shop around to find the cheapest available process and use it.