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

Wed Aug 24 13:10:44 CEST 2011

 On Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:00:43 +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 
+ <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
+> [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 :)
+
+ I quite like the wording, actually. :)
+
+ Gordan
+