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

[Gordan Bobic]

 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