[Mageia-dev] ARM 3D support was Re: [fedora-arm] ARM summit at Plumbers 2011

Wed Aug 24 13:00:43 CEST 2011

[ok i'm going to do another cross-post in a bit which will give some
+background and also perhaps some other topics for discussion, but i
+wanted to cover this first.  apologies for people for whom this is
+just noise]
+
+On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 7:01 PM,  <omalleys at msu.edu> wrote:
+
+>>  the xilinx zynq-7000 or similar (dual core Cortex A9 + FPGA). The idea
+>>  is to have an OGP GPU in firmware in FPGA. In terms of the power budget,
+>>  it seems to work relatively sanely considering what it is, and it is as
+>>  ideal as it gets as far as openness and flexibility goes.
+>>
+>>  I just thought it's worthy of a mention.
+>
+> It does seem outlandish, but it is kind of cool. Is it going to give enough
+> 3d speed? The next gen tegra is supposed to have a 24 core GPU.
+
+ if nvidia have a published announcement of their plans to release a
+fully free-software-compliant 3D driver to match the proprietary
+hardware, then that would be brilliant news [about their next gen
+GPU].
+
+ about the zynq idea: it actually doesn't matter if it's "enough".
+the very fact that free software developers - and people who want to
+be free software developers - around the world could even _remotely_
+consider buying one of these for an affordable price instead of $750
+for the present OGP card means that more people can at least begin to
+try to address the unbelievably wide and very discouraging gap between
+us and proprietary 3D hardware.
+
+ the NREs on producing a set of masks are _only_ $250,000 if you are a
+taiwanese company asking TSMC, but for everyone else they're at least
+$2 million.  the development costs if you use off-the-shelf tools
+before you even _get_ to the point where you can ask a fab to produce
+those masks spiral out of control (Mentor Graphics charges something
+like $250,000 per month or maybe per week per user; NREs for
+peripheral hard macros can be $50k to $100k each etc. etc.), taking
+the total development costs in many cases to well above $USD 30
+million.
+
+ and that's excluding all that "proprietary software" which of course
+is utterly useless without the corresponding hardware but, because of
+USA Accountancy Rules, where "IP" can be added to the books to
+increase the value of a company, there's a strong financial
+disincentive to consider just "givvin it aww away 4 fwee".
+
+ and here we are with a CPU which could well be around the $25 - $30
+mark in large enough volumes, presented with the possibility to say
+"**** u all, you proprietary GPU companies and your greed, fear,
+patent warfare and lack of willingness to collaborate and cooperate".
+
+ok maybe not those exact words but you know what i mean :)
+
+l.
+