Open Source Graphics Card Available For Advance Orders 262
mollyhackit writes "The Open Graphics Project, which we've been following since it first started looking for experts four years ago, has just announced that the OGD1 is available for preorder now. The design features 2 DVI, 256MB RAM, PCI-X, and a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA along with a nonvolatile FPGA for programming on boot. FPGAs are reprogrammable hardware which means the graphics card can be optimized for specific tasks and execute them faster than a general purpose CPU. The card could be programmed for certain codecs to speed up encoding or decoding. An open hardware design means potential for better driver support. Of course you could always use the FPGA for something else... say crypto cracking."
Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of appropriate considering it's basically a graphics card designed by hobbyists, don't you think? I don't think a Virtex is the best choice, either: it uses a lot of power and has an onboard PowerPC core that wouldn't really be that useful. Any graphics card implemented on FPGAs will use a lot of power for relatively poor performance. To compete, you'll need enough orders to get your design fab'ed by TSMC or someone.
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Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Informative)
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The FPGA card is NOT intended to compete with ATI and Nvidia. My understanding is that even the eventual ASIC version isn't intended to compete with the high-end cards.
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Funny)
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"If you aren't happy with this Open Source project, fork it and do something better."
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FTFY, HTH, HAND
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YHBT. YHL. FOAD.~
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Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Informative)
What most people seem to have overlooked is that this isn't an expensive video card. It's a midrange FPGA development card, that happens to be suitable for prototyping video card functionality. It is NOT intended that average users or even power users would buy this to use it as a video card.
The plan is that this card will be used for development of the logic for a video card, which will then be realized in an ASIC in order to produce actual video cards.
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Insightful)
So, um, yeah... Xilinx.
$1500 video card! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Funny)
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A) Open source video card which uses a PCI[-X] port...
B) Build a new gaming rig (MB, Q6600, 2GB DDR3, GeForce 8800 GTS, etc..)
Such a difficult choice, decisions decisions...
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it really a graphics card, or is it something that might possibly become one with the right FPGA programming.
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The choice is indeed an easy one, because it doesn't exist. Prospective buyers would only ever be interested in one or the other; they don't serve the same purpose.
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Richard Stallman [blogspot.com]
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The developers must be cursing slashdot at the moment
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Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Funny)
I call shenanigans!
Guess it's time to go back to my cheaper boot-legged graphics card [cf.ac.uk].
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Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Informative)
Yup... price of a nice GeForce and the time it takes to hack the identifier as described here [techarp.com].
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It is a very sad statement of modern affairs when any kind of hack to your own hardware can be considered piracy.
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Interesting)
Except it is. (Score:5, Informative)
So, it was created to prototype a video card, and it's only practical uses are real-time video (output) processing, thus it is a video card.
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Informative)
Essentilly if you don't want the card for graphics what you get is a relatively small FPGA (one of the smaller members of the spartan 3 family which is xilinx's current low end family) on a PCI-X card. This board is way overpriced for that.
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:4, Informative)
PCI-X (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what kind of architectures you could really test with this thing. It has slower memory on it than is on my motherboard. I honestly believe you could write software renderers faster than this thing.
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This is a prototype! The final product can be realized on better silicon and a faster bus.
Re:PCI-X (Score:5, Insightful)
But this 'product' makes no sense to me. They admit it is more useful at this point as an FPGA dev kit. But $1500 is a lot to plunk down for an introduction to FPGA develeopment.
This [xilinx.com] product direct from xilink makes a lot more sense for someone getting started. Ok, it only has 128MB instead of 256M, a single VGA port instead of dual DVI and a smaller FPGA. On the upside though the cheaper board is PCIe instead of PCI-X which is getting hard to find a machine to stick it into. But it is in the same family and when ya actually have a design that won't fit in the smaller part is when you should think about buying a bigger one.
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why not pci-e based? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why not pci-e based? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And I would pay off my house too.... and take a vacation...
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the first think I would buy would be a fancy car
A few hundred thousand should get you a damned nice car. Anything after that and you're just wanking.
And I would pay off my house too.... and take a vacation...
How much is that?
I'm betting an open source video card is going to cost enough that unless you go out of your way [wikipedia.org] to spend money, you can afford pretty much all the stuff you listed, and it'd still be a drop in the bucket compared to development costs.
If I had, say, ten or twenty million dollars, I'd spend a few hundred thousand on myself, and then think about how to benefit the world with the rest of it.
National Public Computing? (Score:2)
This makes me wonder if someone could setup a foundation of some sort to act similar to Public Radio/Television. I don't have the money to build or run a radio or TV station, but when 15000 people donate 50 or 100 bucks, suddenly the money is there to run the radio station. The problem with this, however, is that public radio and televisio
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As if that weren't enough of a deterrent, what's the target market for this graphics card ? Clearly not the high end gamers, nor the professional rendering crowd. What, you want to market an open-source graphics card to Linux users ? A community that is built on the philosophy of making the most of older hardware... they're not going to pay anywhere near enough money t
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Re:why not pci-e based? (Score:5, Informative)
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How about reprogramming it as a CPU? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about reprogramming it as a CPU? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I wish... grocery shopping would be a whole lot more exciting then.
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Exactly the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think shopping in a nice muscle car or even a ricejob would be a lot more exciting than a Formula 1.
A nice muscle car, or a "ricejob" (offensive term?), is going to do more than one thing. It'll have heating, cooling, a radio, turn signals...
A Formula 1 car might not even be street legal, let alone comfortable for anything other than racing.
Right tool for the job, can't be said enough. Even CPUs have things like math coprocessors. It's no surprise that even if a video card technically can run Linux, it might not be very good at it. (A fair example: PS2 Linux.)
Re:Exactly the point. (Score:4, Funny)
Ricejob it is.
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This is such a fantastic analogy.
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Since its all FPGAs I'd think "yes".
Might be an interesting spinoff project if it gets enough interest.
This is cool (Score:5, Interesting)
This card, while too expensive for me, might spur some interesting projects - cypto stuff and Ray tracing come to mind. I hope someone does something great with this.
Classical Hand-Drawn Animation (Score:3, Interesting)
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All video cards cost this much... (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a finished product by any stretch of the imagination. These are prototypes. Back in the day prototypes were wirewrapped nightmares and they cost a lot more than $1500!
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Hmm, I dunno what volumes theese guys are planning to do but my guess is it is sufficiant that even back in the days when wirewrap was feasible the design would have been committed to PCB.
While in many ways progress is good most electronics hobbyists nowadays are left with the stark realisation that dealing with chips that are anywhere near performance competitive with PC hardware is a huge and e
Since you ask so nicely (Score:4, Funny)
you might be getting ripped off if... (Score:5, Informative)
I guess they don't really have the board volume to get low prices. But If you want a graphics card for $1500 that's probably less functional than an NVidia commodity card, I'm not gonna stop you.
OTOH, If you're interested in FPGA programming and a novice at it, you'll want to get a MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper Spartan board (like 50 to 150). See http://digilentinc.com/ [digilentinc.com] for good starter boards.
If you're serious about FPGA programming (or just willing to pay $1500 to $3000) you will definitely want to get a board with a Virtex or Stratix on board:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML501-UNI-G.htm [xilinx.com]
If you want to have it on PCIx:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML555-G.htm [xilinx.com]
You can also get FPGAs socketted for AMD's Hypertransport bus and Intel's FSB:
http://xtremedatainc.com/ [xtremedatainc.com] (Altera FPGAs)
http://drccomputer.com/ [drccomputer.com] (Xilinx FPGAs)
http://nallatech.com/ [nallatech.com]
http://celoxica.com/ [celoxica.com]
(some of these vendors also sell PCI solutions)
FPGA programming environments still mostly suck. it's a market impeded by proprietary standards and a whole lot of NP-Hard algorithms. We're working on it...
Re:you might be getting ripped off if... (Score:4, Informative)
Any idea where to get low priced DSP boards? (Score:2)
Re:you might be getting ripped off if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, I think this is great. Once they reach the stage of being able to compete with a low-end Nvidia/ATI on features and price, I would consider buying one. The cards could be optimised to work with whatever operating system you would be running on the machine, and would be guaranteed to have no driver compatibility issues.
I hope they are successful with this and can move into other areas. An open soundcard would also be very nice to have.
Re:you might be getting ripped off if... (Score:4, Informative)
my point is that there are a dirth of FPGA boards with better cost/performance value that could be used to prototype a graphics rendering FPGA system. Physical hardware isn't the limiting factor to an open source graphics card; the open source FPGA 3-D rendering code is the real missing piece. In fact, making a board was probably a distraction for this project because by the time the firmware is ready for real graphics workloads the FPGA on-board will be obsolete.
Here's some examples of 3-D engines for FPGA from the 6.111 lab at MIT:
3-D Pong (using rasterization):
http://web.mit.edu/6.111/www/s2006/PROJECT/7/main.html [mit.edu]
Ray Tracing:
http://web.mit.edu/6.111/www/s2007/PROJECTS/5/main.html [mit.edu]
There are hundreds of videos and code for FPGA projects up at http://web.mit.edu/6.111 [mit.edu] (see project appendices for code).
OT: "dirth" (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, you said exactly the opposite of what you were trying to say
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I'd like to see more general use (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm concerned about the shelf-life after I'm done tinkering.
I'd like an I2C bus, a few led connectors, and some magic so that I can connect a general purpose daughter board the FPGA's address bus (ie: implement USB, LAN, audio support that way). Every FPGA should be able to run as a Tanenbaum CPU [opencores.org] by law!
As far as rendering goes I can't see an FPGA being as fast as an ASIC - propagation delay is going to hammer it, and syncing will be a bitch - but I'm still interested in what it can do offline (assuming I can get a vesa console
Good luck!
Matt
Text mode (Score:2)
I'm more of a video card user. But I could try to learn what it takes to program this card. I'd just want to be sure that what I want to do is feasible. The actual designers might understand if it is or not.
Much of my computer use, including almost all programming, is done in text mode with Linux virtual console semantics, which work better and faster than terminal emulation under X does (for people that are used to it having done it this way since Linux came out, and on other systems before that). The
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Linux virtual console semantics, which work better and faster than terminal emulation under X does
It must have been a very, very long time since you've tried terminal emulation under X. It's trivial now to get something like Konsole or gnome-terminal, or even a ton of aterms under Fluxbox, to run in a tabbed mode. Given the right combination of terminal emulation and window manager, you could probably get it as good or better than you've been using under a VT.
Why force your video card to render text, when X can do it for you?
Bonus -- no lag from switching modes (or anything else) when flipping
Cancel the project: this is a waste of time. (Score:5, Insightful)
This project would be so much better off reverse engineering Cuda to make an open source driver than trying to make their own graphics chip. Hell, even Intel is having a very hard time getting a high-end graphics chip to work, and they've got so many more resources than this project.
Open source software works because anyone can hack on it and produce comparable stuff with zero initial investment. Hardware does not work that way. There is just way too much of an initial investment required. Even with FPGAs it's too expensive, and you're way too far behind to start with.
These people are idiots to think they can succeed here unless one of them has a 90nm fab in his or her backyard. (Sorry -- this is qualitatively different than trying to write your own OS, which is done all the time in undergrad classes.)
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Sure, hardware requires actual money, and that makes it harder to do in an open way than software. What's wrong with trying? What's wrong with experimentation? You don't know it's not possible until it doesn't work---and even then, that still doesn't fully prove that it isn't possible.
Certainly you do hope that they succeed, don't you? Otherwise, what i
100 replies and nobody's mentioned Project VGA yet (Score:5, Interesting)
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Card for Zealots (Score:4, Insightful)
If you really want totally open source drivers they'll be available for ATI cards in the not too distant future.
This graphics card when it finishes won't be "open source" because you won't be able to change it, it might have open specifications, and it might have a good relationship with the open source community, but the open source community is just as bad at maintaining a relationship with hardware vendors as hardware vendors are at maintaining a relationship with open source.
If you're willing to pay $1500 for your ideology that's your call, but I'd rather pay $500 and get a card that's substantially faster, and is actually programmed to do something other than diagnose itself and I don't really give a rats if the drivers are open or closed source.
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Re:Uh...not for me! (Score:5, Interesting)
If graphics programming was my thing, I so would get one. I am considering getting one regardless, if only to use it for ray tracing.
Flexible hardware + Good open source ideals = excellent product
Re:Uh...not for me! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:So far, nobody has brought up the actual value (Score:4, Insightful)
Not enough cells (Score:2)
Spartan 3 doesn't seem to have a huge amount of cells. So, even if you could cram entry-level cards designs into it, that won't be usefull for developpers because they do
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814195040 [newegg.com]
It may just work for you.
Re:No open FPGA tools, though... (Score:4, Informative)
If you can find an FPGA for which there are open-source development tools, by all means please let us know about it. Meanwhile those of us that want to get actual work done with FPGAs will make do with the closed-source tools.
People routinely appear in comp.arch.fpga saying that they will write open-source FPGA development software, but none have succeeded at that yet. Perhaps the underestimate the magnitude of the problem. Xilinx has literally thousands of man years invested into developing their tools; it's not something for which one person or a small team can knock out a functional replacement in a year or two.
I try to use open-source software as much as possible, and I release much of the software I write in my spare time under the GPL, but for certain problems, open-source software just isn't going to be practical in the near term.
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Yeah. Now if I could just find one of those ATI cards with a 64-bit/66 MHz PCI interface and usable open drivers able to do dual DVI-D outputs at 2048x1536 each, I'd be happy...
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Quite frankly, I also think that English language is quite primitive and sentences are assembled like lego pieces.
Still, I do use that language. It's a very useful one, no matter how I dislike it.
I think not (Score:4, Insightful)
It looks like, basically, this thing is a $1400 prototype that OEM's could use as the basis for a consumer video card.
Can someone out there who knows more about hardware design and fab than I do tell me - once someone has come up with decent programming for an FPGA, can non-programmable, cheaper, maybe even faster, chips be fabbed? I assume that is generally how the design process works - start with an expensive, programmable chip, get the firmware correct, then mass produce non-programmable chips that are much cheaper?
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Once the design is finalized it's going to be ported as a chip. The initial production cost for fabbing a chip is near 1 or 2 million
Of course it runs Linux. Here's the git server... (Score:2)
http://git.xilinx.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=linux-2.6-xlnx.git;a=summary [xilinx.com]
Re:Serious Question....Please answer if you know! (Score:5, Informative)
Don't! and I'd say that to anyone. What they are offering is a FPGA dev kit, with nothing to put on the FPGA. Yes, they've done a board design, but that's really one of the easiest bits, especially as most firms that sell the chips give you sample designs that you can stitch together.
The HDL is the key to this project, and as far as I can see they haven't produced anything beyond very basic PCI and Memory Controllers (which I'd expect to be very low performance). I looked at the same code about 2 years ago (maybe more) and it's in exactly the same state now as it was then. I say this as someone who writes VHDL / Verilog for a living and was wondering if I should contribute, but I'm not interested in carrying the whole thing myself.
If this projects manages to get a framebuffer device up and running within 5 years I'll be impressed. I think the whole project is incredibly naive, and doesn't understand the scale of the project they're trying to do