Re: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable?

[Tim Connors]

Greg Buchholz <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said on Thu, 21 Oct 2004 10:08:08 -0700:
> Stephen Wille Padnos wrote:
> >I guess I would look at this as an opportunity to make a "visual
> >coprocessor", that also has the hardware necessary to output to a
> >monitor (preferably multiple monitors).
> 
>     This idea is a step in the right direction.  To make the project
> viable, you might be better off trying to court a slightly different
> audience (instead of the cost-sensitive/3D-performant market).  What if
> instead, you were selling a highly parallel reprogrammable computing
> core, which also happened to do graphics?  I could see a potentially
> much bigger and higher profit margin market for a standardized interface
> from Linux to an FPGA.  Image people buying them for headless servers as
> crypto accellerators.  Or as DSP/FFT accellerators (for speech
> recognition , MPEG compression, or whatever).  I'm sure you'd sell a few
> to grad students writing theses on data flow machines, parallel
> languages, prime factorization etc.  Heck, I'd buy one just because it'd
> be cool to try and write a 1000 element merge sort in hardware that
> completed in one or two clock cycles.  It's not hard to imaging people
> using it to speed up emulators like QEMU.  Maybe the distributed
> computing folks (Folding@Home, SETI) would also be interested, since
> their work is already highly parallelizable.  You get the idea. 

People would happily pay millions for this.

Tim has probably heard of Grape?

I don't know whether grape uses FPGAs or not, but take a look at the
photo down the bottom of this:

http://grape.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~fukushig/paper/sc96/sc96.html

I reckon if we could put an accelarator card in each of our 200 new
machines, that could be programmed on the fly to do N-body
calculations, or then changed to do SPH, or whatever, and we only had
to pay $500 per card, and it doubled performace, we'd do it in a
second. Half the number of computers, drop energy consumption (and
cooling), etc. It'd be great.


-- 
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
A mouse is a device used to focus xterms.
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