Re: [ox-en] Free Design for graphics card
- From: "Florian v. Samson" <fsamson unix-ag.uni-kl.de>
- Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2008 18:13:44 +0200
Hello,
On Sun, Sep 07, 2008 at 10:35:35AM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Stefan Merten wrote:
I just saw
http://wiki.opengraphics.org/
I'm not an expert here but AFAICS the design is based on FPGA chips
(field programmable logic arrays) which is best described as
programmable hardware. You can reconfigure the chip by software to
execute the needed functionality. At the moment this seems do be
considered a development board and they plan to design an ASIC which
is a chip which is custom designed and faster.
The project founded the company
http://traversaltech.com/
to produce and sell the hardware based on the Free Design.
This has been around for quite some time.
From their about-us page:
Traversal Technology LLC was founded to manage the production and
sale of hardware based on various open designs, and to provide
professional validation and commercial support for these products.
Open designs and open interfaces allow Traversal Technology to
interact with the Open Source community for mutual benefit. By
leveraging the potential of the Open Source community, Traversal
Technology is able to offer quality products at competitive prices.
Conversely, users are able to use their hardware to its full
potential on any platform, unhindered by lack of documentation, lack
of support, or trade secrets.
One of the restrictions of the project:
* While the hardware will be open spec, not all of it will be open
source at first. This gives Traversal Technology the advantage it
needs to recoup its non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs. (Edit
by Tim: We have committed to releasing all of the RTL to the chip.
Some of it is being developed in the open already. Some of it may
be released at the time the ASIC is released. Some of it will be
released after a time delay necessary for said competitive
advantage.)
-- http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php?page=AboutOpenGraphics
Well, under cover this has been selling for quite some time at as
Raptor 4000 from TechSource
<http://www.techsource.com/products/atc_gra/4000_4000e/index.asp>.
Hence it is questionable tho waht extent this project is inspired by
some OpenSource philosohy, rather than sticking formally to the rules to
utilise the nice label.
In contrast to the OGD, which is only available with an PCI-X connector,
(almost no regular motherboard has such a slot), the Raptor 4000 is also
available as an PCI-E card.
On the net you will not find any link between ODG/Traversaltech and
TechSource, but technically the products are identical. When I placed a
hint about that connection on the wikipedia page
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_Graphics_Project&oldid=223398235>
it was deleted in less than 15 minutes.
Regards,
Florian
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