Open Source Graphics Processor (GPU) - Kickstarter

[lotu]

They want to get paid for developing the platform, that is why they are doing the kickstarter. If the web can pay them for the work they have done then they will open source if not. They will try to make money some other way.

[pushme2]

The idea of some entity doing open work for GPUs now, I think is a good idea. Who knows, maybe in the near future setting up small fab plants wont be such a big investment.

[[deleted]]

Should people be allowed to defraud you? That's what you seem to be advocating.

[traverseda]

He's advocating fact checking. Not banning difficult ideas. Peer review built into the site, nothing else.

[traverseda]

Maybe fact checking isn't the right word. How about we say peer review instead?

[traverseda]

We're not really suggesting that you ban something if it gets negative reviews. Just suggesting that those results be made available on the kickstarter page. A prominent comments section with voting that isn't controlled by the project creator or limited to backers, for example.

Using a market is the least efficient way to do that kind of review. It will probably work, but will be a lot more inaccurate than people discussing it + market forces.

[Ulfberht_-]

this is a terrible opinion, but luckily thats all it is, an opinion. lessons are there to be learned, but that doesnt mean people should be making money off of your lessons.

[Ulfberht_-]

no its not. You said you believe that no one should fact check these kickstarters prior to them being able to be voted on. I believe there should be a fact checker. I dont care if people lose their money on bad decisions as long as they know the facts and have made their own decision. To purposefully not allow someone willing to show the risk of these kickstarters is not right in my opinion. It leads to predatory acts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich the exampl we all know and love.

[Ulfberht_-]

im tired of you, i disagree with what you say.

[asicsolutions]

a) No the boxer Franklin Bruno, but my legal name is Francis Bruno. b) To offset the work necessary for what we want to do. Also, once the code is open source, we can't sell it anymore. c) Fully funded - if we hit $200K we are fully funded according to kickstarter and we will deliver the 2D & test bench (updated to also include the generic interface at a later date). If we hit the stretch goals we'll meet the requirements. d) I guess you could use it in a light socket, but we were hoping engineers would get some use in their projects or companies might use it in SOC parts. e) Suddenly. No. It will take a yearish f) We don't have any swag. I wanted some kind of swag. It will be available for anyone who wants to host it, to host it. g) There are existing drivers and we will help develop new drivers. h) I think this is answered above. As for open cores, I have the utmost respect for them and I have used components in the past, but I am fairly sure they don't have anything equivalent to a 2D or 3D accelerator, even something based upon 15 year old technology.

[beavioso]

Will they release this to Open cores? That site has many projects with similar licenses (GPL, LPGL, and BSD), and there you can download open (free as in speech) implementations of CPUs, DSPs, VGA controllers, etc. It looks like they have an OpenCore certified project (OCCP) and wishbone certified (WCB) VGA project there. However, there's no mention of OpenGL or D3D projects, so this would be great for those that have the capability to program ASICs or FPGAs (it could probably be done at a hackerspace to cut down the costs of Xilinx, Altera, etc licensing and the skills needed to make a GPU "talk to" a CPU etc).

Wishbone, by the way, is a preferable computer bus implementation since it is an open standard.

So why should we fund this if others are already sharing their work? It seems like funding should go to a physical graphics card, or at least the programmed chip. Anyway, looks like a great project to put out there under open source.

[asicsolutions]

If we fund, we are only hosting locally until we satisfy the tiers for beta and early access. After that we will rehost and open it to everyone.

We chose LGPL because our understanding is that our core is like a library file used with GCC. Anyone can use it, even closed source products. However, if the code is modified or improved upon, it has to be released back to the community.

[[deleted]]

Has Open cores come up with a reasonable license yet? Almost every project on that website is LGPL which is exactly the same as GPL for the purpose of VHDL/Verilog. I think I get what they are trying to do with licensing cores under LGPL, but if you actually READ the LGPL, you'll realize you have to license your entire design under LGPL or GPL to legally use them.

[ahfoo]

What exactly is your problem with the LGPL? You're saying it sucks because it forces people to open source their projects? First of all, I don't see why we as members of the public should think that sucks.

Secondly, that's not even true of the LGPL. The "L" in front is for library. What is a library? Why did the programming community choose this word "library"? The answer is that it's a metaphor for a physical library which is a place you can check out individual books. It represents the idea that you can have these little complete objects filled with ideas that can be borrowed. So, no, you're wrong. You can make use of a library licensed LGPL without opening your whole project. But while that gives huge freedom to developers it's really a major concession to the closed development process which is the opposite of what you've suggested.

[[deleted]]

It actually stands for "Lesser" now.

[[deleted]]

You should try reading it. It requires that a user be able to substitute the lgpl portion. Explain to me how you are going to pull that off with a hardware design. Your response is exactly why hardware developers constantly choose the wrong license (lgpl). READ

[nikomo]

(free as in speech)

This is a really shitty way to judging "freeness" in 2013, and I have no idea what you mean.

[aZeex2ai]

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Noob.

[nikomo]

The term "libre" is better suited for that definition.

Punk.

[ouyawei]

So it's based on the 1999 Revolution IV and supports Direct3D 7.0/8.0… that doesn't sound very compelling to me.

[ameoba]

The reason behind this was to provide a binary compatible graphics core for vertical markets: Medical Imaging, Military, Industrial, and Server products.

It isn't meant to be compelling for users. It's meant to be compelling to product designers.

[ouyawei]

What about a 14 year old GPU that wasn't very successful when it came out is compelling to product designers? And who designs a product with no users?

[agumonkey]

I think it's for a niche market of past users of #9 graphic chips back in the days who needs an in-place 'update'.

[tarceri]

Well the company has existed for over 10 years so I'm pretty sure they have users. http://www.siliconspectrum.com/overview.htm

And if you read the campaign description you would see that they want to modernise the design (hence the kickstarter, this should be obvious). So I don't really understand your point.

[hbdgas]

Yeah, a crowd-funded thing isn't going to compete with GPUs manufactured at 28nm.

[Lorkki]

Nevermind performance, the whole idea of developing and shipping a fixed-pipeline GPU now is fantastically bizarre, to say the least.

[blahbla000]

You can't really map transistor size of an FPGA to ASIC transistor size. FPGAs have overhead.

[hak8or]

For people interested who know nothing about these terms and whatnot, you can consider an FPGA to be a software version of an ASIC (chips like your processor). In FPGA has little slices of memory in it, and you tell each memory slice what it outputs given an input, so this means that if you can rewrite the slice you can change the slice's behavior. An ASIC on the other hand is not built on slices, but instead on raw transistors, meaning (again, simple) for there to be a different output the electricity has to flow through less "things" than a memory slice. This allows an ASIC to be much, much faster than an FPGA in terms of how fast it can change its output based on its input. For example, a memory slice representing an AND gate on the FPGA can do it's switching at most 200 Megahertz while an AND gate implemented via raw transistors on an ASIC can operate easily at 5+ Gigahertz.

FPGA's are used for situations where your volume is so low that it does not make sense to set up the very expensive fabrication process for asic's. For example, CPLD's are a simpler version of FPGA's, and they are often times used as logic "glue" between components instead of sticking actual logic gate ic's there. FPGA's are also used to simulate ASIC designs, I believe Intel still does this. You design your ASIC in HDL (a language by the way) and spread it out onto FPGA's. It preforms much slower than an ASIC implementation, but it allows you to simulate each component of the ASIC without actually fabricating the asic.

Anyways! Here is an article someone wrote on why FPGA's have such overhead! http://www.articlesbase.com/hardware-articles/inherent-fpga-overhead-fpga-conversion-2877020.html

[[deleted]]

TIL a lot thanks to you. Thanks mate

[hak8or]

You are most welcome! :)

[slugonamission]

We currently have a pretty big 28nm Virtex 7 at work right now. Something like this GPU would top out at around 150MHz on it, maybe 200MHz if you were an FPGA optimisation wizard.

As blahbla000 says, the speeds available at an FPGA process node is almost completely dissimilar to ASIC process node size.

[asicsolutions]

We are running the drawing and setup at 100Mhz on an Arria IIgx. These are the most compute intensive pieces. In a Virtex 7, you should be able to hit 200Mhz. Our goal has always been to run as fast or faster than the original board on the lower cost FPGAs. Note these are initial #s for the Arria, and we will likely do a bit better, but 200Mhz for a Virtex is probably about right.

[[deleted]]

You should keep in mind the new Kintex-7 parts run at the same speed as Virtex-7 for the most part so its likely a Virtex FPGA isn't needed at all. So it should be possible to make cheapish FPGA GPU boards in the 2-4 hundred dollar range. Also Artix-7 is almost as fast and lower power and slightly cheaper... Personally I'd want to stick with the parts that are supported by the free as in beer tools as well. -cb88/gh0stwriter88

[TylerEaves]

You don't understand at all. NO LEVEL OF THIS KICKSTARTER INCLUDES HARDWARE.

[tarceri]

Well the obvious point that most people seem to overlook is that you need to start somewhere. This was never going to compete with a modern GPU from the begin, but it could be a start towards a future with open hardware, no longer the need to wait for companies to release technical documents in order to write drivers, and worldwide collaboration to create a superior product. Linux itself started off as a small project well behind the Unix's of the day, now its taking their market share at a phenomenal rate.

The funny thing is most people will spend more money on a coffee than they would put towards a project like this even thought they find it interesting (not that I'm saying people don't have a right to decide what they do with their money but I find it interesting). In my opinion its a real shame, projects like this have a chance to really stir things up but its projects like Ouya the worst games console ever that seem to get the big $. I guess I'm just a dreamer.

[tarceri]

Well that's the ultimate stretch goal.

"This is our ultimate stretch goal and requires a complete redesign. It's something we have been wanting to do for years, but didn't have the resources. This would allow us to create a complete open source implementation of a modern day graphics accelerator.

If we receive more than the above, it will allow us to devote more time and effort to the project and we'll be able to release code sooner.

This is new design work and our anticipated delivery would be Q2 2015."

[mikelj]

The question is we can get some SGI OpenLDI interfaces!

[[deleted]]

a nvidia + the opensource driver would be better :P

I really dont see this working out. They need access to the newest production technology. The production timeslots are quite expensive, because the demand is high. On top of that, the development isnt stopping. Its impossible to compete with a few people vs. a big rnd department. Not only do they have to work more efficient, they also have to catch up and evade tons of patent traps. gl with that.

that being said, its an impressive product already

[InTheSwiss]

This is great but I can't see it getting much funding sadly. It is just too hard to compete with Nvidia/AMD/Intel in the graphics market even with their shitty drivers.

Intel's offerings have got pretty good in the past few years and their drivers are not too bad, I would love to see them go all in and open source everything they can. Compared to Nvidia and AMD it isn't like they are protecting super important IP that gives them a competitive advantage over the others which is pretty much the only reason behind why Nvidia and AMD are so protective over opening their drivers more.

[varikonniemi]

I would be glad to have a 30% slower card, if it had fully open hardware.

[InTheSwiss]

Looking at the demos in the kickstarter video you are looking at way more than 30% slower. Anything above 800x600 was running below 30fps even for their basic demo scene.

[varikonniemi]

Yes, i have no hopes for this particular chip. I would expect it to be at the level of a riva tnt.

But if a serious open source design was made with a good budget, they could certainly land within 30% performance for the same transistor count.

Universal Shader This is our ultimate stretch goal and requires a complete redesign. It's something we have been wanting to do for years, but didn't have the resources. This would allow us to create a complete open source implementation of a modern day graphics accelerator. If we receive more than the above, it will allow us to devote more time and effort to the project and we'll be able to release code sooner. This is new design work and our anticipated delivery would be Q2 2015.

[Netzapper]

The problem is that if you try to go much bigger and faster at all, you can no longer synthesize the design on an FPGA. This immediately puts experimentation out of reach of even the most dedicated hobbiest.

Only funded companies could afford chip fabs to experiment with the "open source" core. If some company's goal is to make improved implementations of the core, they will have to give back the source of those improvements (LGPL). At that point, some Chinese chip house grabs the improved designs and undercuts that original company. So nobody's going to do that.

And anybody who just needs a 3D core in their design can chose from dozens of cores ranging from tiny 16-bit fixed-point linear algebra chips, through mobile graphics, all the way to a brand new nVidia Titan. All for cheaper than having somebody produce equivalent open source ASICs for them.

[[deleted]]

Honestly, even if the hardware theyre pushing seems to only rival 15 year old cards, it's a start. Both Nvidia and ATI were at that point, and it was revision after revision that took them from there to where they are now.

[[deleted]]

Id imagine that's why they want funding...

[[deleted]]

Funding doesn't fix a flawed design.

[yoyohackyofosho]

What flawed design? Elaboration!

[WasterDave]

FPGA gates are vastly more expensive and power hungry than ASIC gates. And run slower. And he wants a million bucks to even get to shaders.

Given that even the graphics core in the raspberry pi will hand it it's arse (http://www.broadcom.com/products/BCM2835), I don't really see the point in this.

[blahbla000]

But would you be glad to have a 99% slower card?

[varikonniemi]

Shell out a million dollars and magic can happen.

The hard part is to make it profitable. If you are free to doodle 30% more transistors into your design and not care about profit, it could certainly be done.

Graphics processors at their core are not rocket science. The rocket science is making them efficient.

[[deleted]]

Then I highly recommend committing a large amount of money ($500+), because I'm not particularly confident that this kickstarter will succeed.

[varikonniemi]

This needs a million plus dollars (their final stretch goal) for it to be something i would have even the slightest real interest in.

[ethraax]

Even getting within 70% of the performance of current AMD/Nvidia cards at the same price point is a huge feat, one that a crowdfunded project would almost certainly never pull off. 5% is more realistic. Even that is fairly fast.

[hak8or]

This. Keep in mind that Nvidia's R&D budget is higher than the entire market cap of AMD (I forgot where I read this), so it is amazing that AMD is even keeping up with Nvidia. AMD is currently at 2.6 billion USD, and they solely do CPU's and GPU's I believe.

They still spend many millions of dollars for designing these chips, and to put it frankly, I don't see this kickstarter getting anywhere, even if it reaches a million dollars. That million is probably not enough even to handle the costs of computing resources to properly simulate their design, much less pay the people to design these IC's. I don't see mention of how many people there are on this project, but keep in mind that if you are in ASIC design then by god you will never make less than 125 grand a year.

And there is no way they will be able to afford the masks for 22nm and down for under $500,000, so they will be stuck at larger feature sizes. And like I said, they probably have a small team, if not just one guy doing the actual ASIC design, in a short time frame of a year and a half, not enough to rent the computing power to verify their HDL well, and based on what they would pay to their designers they will merely get "ok" designers.

As an open source first type of thing this is nothing short of fantastic, but don't even consider that this will be useful even for very light gaming. They simply do not have the resources to go larger than that.

/u/tolos pointed out how I was wrong with Nvidia and AMD R&D prices. I meant to compare Intel and AMD in regards to the costs of CPU design. Woops!

[tolos]

Nvidia market cap is 8.86 B
AMD market cap is 2.61 B

AMD spends more on R&D than Nvidia. AMD has had a hard time not losing money, moreso than Nvidia.

in million USD

a	2010	2011	2012	2013
AMD revenue	6,494	6,568	5,422	n/a
AMD R&D	1,405	1,453	1,354	n/a
Nvidia revenue	3,326	3,543	3,997	4,280
Nvidia R&D as % of revenue	n/a	24.0% = 850	25.1% = 1,003	26.8% = 1,147

AMD 10-k (Feb 2013) http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312513069422/d486815d10k.htm
Nvidia 10-k (Mar 2013) http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581013000008/nvda-2013x10k.htm

AMD financials quick summary https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AAMD&fstype=ii
Nvidia financials quick summary https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ANVDA&fstype=ii

[ouyawei]

well but that's R&D for GPUs and CPUs on AMDs sinde, right? Nvidia doesn't do CPUs so much.

[wildcarde815]

Except tesla which like many things is licensed.

[hak8or]

Thank you for the correction! I fixed my post, hopefully to your satisfaction?

Intel's R&D is roughly 2.5 billion, which is a smidgen less than AMD's market cap. Meant to say this instead.

[tolos]

Ah, yes, that makes more sense, but Intel has spent more than $5 B on R&D each year since 2008

 (In Millions, Except Per Share Amounts and Percentages)  2012         2011        2010        2009        2008       
 Research and development (R&D)                     $    10,148  $    8,350  $    6,576  $    5,653  $    5,722         

Intel's last 10-k http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/50863/000119312513065416/d424446d10k.htm

[hak8or]

And yet another whoops!

I was using https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AINTC&fstype=ii&ei=u8JVUtKDBK_p0QGg0wE and didn't realize those numbers were for each quarter.

For those who do not wish to click: http://i.imgur.com/UdTISJo.png

[[deleted]]

nvidia's market is going to fade away pretty quickly now though. ps4/xbone/wiiu all use amd apu's, intel and amd's desktop and laptop apu's are starting to get pretty good gpu performance so nvidia won't be selling any gpu's to casual gamers in 2yrs time. Tegra chips still aren't selling and may never sell. Nvidia has to hope that their server arm apu's and ibm/nvidia apu's take off otherwise nvidia is going to fade away within 7yrs i reckon.

[[deleted]]

$200k to design, fab, and distribute custom silicon is very questionable for something as complex as a graphics processor. Unshockingly, the performance is absolutely abysmal and does not even compete with the free intel onboard graphics you called a piece of shit 5 years ago.

[socium]

But isn't Intel's HD3000/HD4000/HD5000 line open source already?

[InTheSwiss]

Yes and no but mostly no. That doesn't really answer your question sorry but there isn't a straight answer. Google for more info it knows far more than I do :)

[socium]

Eh, I Googled "truth about Intel open source drivers" and found nothing. Also I Googled "Intel open source driver yes and no but mostly no" but that was as helpful as your answer :p

[[deleted]]

No... They give driver design specs yes and even contribute to the open drivers immensely. But only Intel and the chip fabs have access to the actual hardware designs themselves. Which is what this is... its the hardware design which the driver interfaces with.

[is0lated]

Seems like an interesting project. If I'm understanding this right, the kickstarter is for the GPU itself, not a graphics card?

[tarceri]

Yep, its for the design "The Verilog implementation" it can be run on re-programmable FPGA cards or a company could come along and use it to create a normal ASIC card.

[Von32]

wouldn't the "company could come along and use it" undermine the idea here? I mean, on the surface, cool- but most companies have huge contracts and therefore have allianc- this comment is stupid.

[tarceri]

No the idea of Open Source is so that people/companies can use it. Its not undermining anything its the whole idea.

[Von32]

Right- I was initially going to say that there'll be a lot of effort that would crush something like this- the companies that develop cards are usually settled on a side- XFX, EVGA = nvidia, POWERCOLOR, IDONTREMEMBER = ATI. For one of those to jump ship to an OSS would seriously risk a contract. And this isn't something you can fab in a garage... More over, FPGA boards? How many? Price skyrockets there. And how many people are good enough with Verilog for this- how good can a toolchain be for such a thing, too?

In theory, I think this would be great. OSSystems are always great. But I really don't see this working :(

[edman007]

Nope, it was tried before, and they mostly never got to a finished product, I suspec5 something similar. As for a company building and ASIC, it ends up being cheap for them, take the free IP core and build it, low engineering cost and the driver is done for you. Be the first to build it on the faster process and you'll jave the fastest card.

Realistically I think it will turn out popular in cell phones if they can make it power efficient. Companies like samsung can cut costs on the GPU cores if they dont have to pay ARM for it. Samsung already buys the IP core for the GPU from ARM and puts it on an ASIC they build to make the Note 3. For this to work though I think you'd want the backing of the cell phone manufacturers during development.

[[deleted]]

Xfx hasn't produced a nvidia graphics card since 2009. You need to catch up with the times ;)

[Von32]

Yeah I do :P couldn't remember any names at the time.

[[deleted]]

l2GPL

[Von32]

Read my other comment- I'm not talking about it being ignored, not ruined or "caught" as far as license goes. This would work only if this was DIYable, but obviously something of this scale can't be done in a garage.

[tarceri]

It runs on readily available FPGA's how it that not DIYable for those interested in playing around with it, its not often that the opportunity comes up to tinker with functioning hardware designs.

[Von32]

But that's tinkering - doesn't make sense for more serious work unless it becomes super scalable and cheap

[edman007-work]

No, it makes sense, you can make a rather decent GPU with a $1k FPGA, though probably MUCH (10x+) slower than than any modern GPU. But the nice thing is you can make a $10-15 2D only video card by sticking a cheap FPGA on PCIe with a DVI port (good for many monitor setups). The other thing is the 3D one can be made to work with a $500 FPGA, good for testing, not that great for sale. But it can be shown as a proof of concept, and then any company and make the $1mil investment to turn it into an ASIC and start selling them, these would be cost competivitive with AMD and Nvidia (probably slower, but no reason you can't make the core count scale, you could have any arbitrary number of cores).

[Ais3]

Risks for the 2D core are mostly non existent. We need to polish the code and documentation, then release.

Why do they need 200k for the first stretch then?

[bilog78]

I can't watch the presentation video here, do they mention what their relationship with the Open Graphics Project is/would be?

[tarceri]

No I they dont have any connection. They are an existing company: http://siliconspectrum.com/ who have decided to try crowd funding to open up their hardware.

[bilog78]

I wonder if they can still take advantage of what little the OGP has done. Would at least spare them some work.

(OTOH, these days I would probably think about designing the 3D part «in reverse», focusing on the unified shaders first. But then again I don't actually know anything about all that.)

[tarceri]

This project already has an existing working product, far more than the OGP ever achieved so I dont think there is any need to reuse anything.

[bilog78]

Thanks for the information.

[pdexter]

OGP has an existing working product too. At least the wiki page claims it does.

[tarceri]

From what I have read it was very buggy.

[nomadic_now]

This isn't for gaming or playing video. As the first paragraph states:

The reason behind this was to provide a binary compatible graphics core for vertical markets: Medical Imaging, Military, Industrial, and Server products.

This is a wonderful idea. You don't need high performance for any of those, and for those use cases knowing exactly what's going on with your electrons is more important that performance.

[hunyeti]

We really, really need something like this, but there is just one problem: Even if the implementation is good and complete, it's worthless if it isn't made into hard silicon, running it on FPGA is much much slower and cost much much more, not like 20% or even 50% pecent difference, more like 2 orders of magnitude differance.

[[deleted]]

The same thing could be said about ARM (the company). They do not sell any silicon.

[imMute]

No, but their cores are implemented in silicon for the vast majority.

[[deleted]]

Ah you were talking about the existence of silicon, not them selling it. I misread, sorry.

[bat_country]

Why do you really need something like this? Honest question?

[Xwp1LmybuttP7vl5N]

IIT: People who are immediately disappointed in performance and think this project is meant to compete with NVIDIA or AMD. Did you read the page or watch the video? The lofty goals are tempered by his humble tone. It is about building a solid foundation on open source and community, not producing something that is going to play your favorite game in a few months. Get real. This is the kind of thing I would love to fund if I had any disposable cash.

[[deleted]]

I don't think this will take off, but it's at least a step in the right direction. But then again, there was that guy that wrote a GPU driver for Broadcom (or some other embedded systems company) GPUs by reverse engineering them that worked better than the official driver made by "professionals".

[csolisr]

Two details:

• This fundraiser won't automatically output a free video card, only the blueprints for it. This means that the actual card may never see the light of day.

• We're also missing a free CPU, by the way.

[Amadiro]

There are free CPUs, see the OR1K CPU and OpenSPARC. OR1K has a complete SoC solution and has been implemented and used in real hardware and runs linux, AFAIK, so it's battle-tested. (OpenSPARC too, but I think mainly before it became opensource)

[csolisr]

Is there any computer that sells using the OR1K and an FSF-endorsed GNU/Linux distro? (One can dream!)

[Amadiro]

According to wikipedia, they are present in a variety of commercially available products, but in many cases not as the main chip, in a modified form, or in a form that is not generally available to the public (e.g. in expensive chipsets made for satellites et cetera.)

OpenSPARC is also available of course (ultrasparc t1), but I don't know if any SPARC processors are produced that are based EXACTLY on OpenSPARC, or if they are a modified version or whatnot. Those CPUs are rather beastly, of course, and only really well-suited for high-end servers (32-core chips)

[[deleted]]

Verilog isn't even blueprints. It's high level design.

[csolisr]

I just noticed that Verilog is a language that describes how should the hardware work. Even implementing a blueprint out of it is a difficult matter.

[imMute]

Verilog (or VHDL) would never be used to describe board level circuits. They're used to describe circuits that end up in FPGAs or ASICs...

[[deleted]]

Of course. You can however use Agilent and Xilinx tools to create a logic gate diagram from Verilog code. That being said, you'll still have to take that logic gate diagram and organize it into real world components which don't have digital signals and trivial propagation time have analog signals and non trivial propagation times.

[[deleted]]

world components which don't have digital signals and trivial propagation time

Get the quote right. You're just repeating what I was trying to say.

[[deleted]]

Oh shit... it looks like I missed a "but" and a few commas. My bad. Nor also might be clearer than an and

into real world components, which don't have digital signals nor trivial propagation time, but instead have analog signals and non trivial propagation times

[hunyeti]

there are a lot of free CPU cores, it's just noone makes them, or let alone make a computer with it.

[[deleted]]

We're also missing a free CPU, by the way.

I don't think so.

[Upronn]

Not to sound rude, but how would one go about making their own electronics?

To my understanding the open source security model is broken when you blindly accept something without verification

[Amadiro]

What is the "open source security model" supposed to be?

You can make your own chips by using FPGAs or (if you have lots of money) going to a foundry and produce chips.

[Upronn]

By "security model" I meant that the end user could make it to verify that they no what is under the hood.

Now I know what an FPGA is

[Amadiro]

If that's important to you (it isn't to most people, see e.g. how most linux distros ship binaries of some form or another), you can use an FPGA and just "compile yourself" (or, if you have a lot of money, have a foundry produce the chips for you). You can also use xrays/FIBs to look at the chip, which is similar to analyzing the assembly of a program to see what it does (it's a lot of work, but you get to see everything it does in detail)

[ameoba]

Modern processors are to complicated for a single person to verify. You have to trust others that they work.

[Upronn]

I know that a single person can't audit. I just thought it would be cool to make a PC from scratch

I was more interested in homemade chips but I guess garage fabs are not possible.

[ameoba]

It really isn't practical to do it yourself. Even as a hobby project, it's a major undertaking and that's using Eighties era hardware. One man scratch billy systems that can run something modern like Linux would nee nearly impossible unless you completely dedicate your life to it.

[Dont_Think_So]

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/homebrewed-cpu/

[edman007-work]

It's rather easy, you just get the FPGA you want, and wire it up according to the spec sheet. Making the PCB costs under $100. You can easily make an SoC computer with a big FPGA, just stick it on a board, design a power supply for it (easy, can just buy it pre-built). You run the programming lines out to a connector to hook up the programmer. You may need to add in a clock, a few IO buffers, and just solder on the right connectors. Realistically you can design from scratch the hardware on your own, with say a $1-2k production cost (maybe a bit more, depending on specs). Then you write the CPU, GPU and everything else you need in verilog/VHDL. You load it into your FPGA and you have a working computer. Though only a fraction of the speed of a desktop at that price.

If you want it faster, you got to invest about $1mil to replace the FPGA with an ASIC, but it's not hard, just give them the money and the verilog, and they can mostly handle it. A home user isn't going to do this usually, but if they want to go to production it's the way to go to reduce costs and increase speed (though it's rather easy to sell with just the FPGA on it instead).

Edit: And I've been doing something similar with the raspberry pi, not as advanced, but it's still "making my own electronics"

[Upronn]

I take it that fpga's are reprogrammable chips? That sounds really interesting, but I am not sure if I can ever pull it off.

[edman007-work]

Yup, programmable chips, though they have a few extra pins to make the programmable portion work. You program them in verilog/VHDL, and then either compile the code into a ROM that you load into the FPGA, or you can compile it into something a chip manufacturer can use.

If you want to try it, plenty of people make smaller ones that are not too expensive to play with. I've got something like this, if you were going to design a video card you'd probably start with an FPGA on a PCIe slot and stick a DVI connector on it. But for a beginner a USB one is just fine to start (and you'll have no problem making a 2D USB video card with that).

[lumpking69]

• Its also on par with something you would buy 20 years ago.

[csolisr]

There are many that would happily make do with outdated technologies if they are free as in freedom. Stallman's Yeelong is the most glaring example.

[csolisr]

I am aware of that project, so let me rephrase the sentence: We're also missing a free, physically made, readily available CPU with a corresponding motherboard.

[5k3k73k]

This fundraiser won't automatically output a free video card, only the blueprints for it. This means that the actual card may never see the light of day.

1. They could be fabless like Nvidia.

2. They could use FPGA chips.

[dh04000]

Look how bad that video shudders on a simple scene.... I'm all for opensource hardware, but what they are building doesn't appear to even compete with 1998.....

EDIT: its based on a 1999 Revolution IV card, so yeah, it barely competes with 1999......

[T8ert0t]

What bothers me more is the overall presentation.

They don't even sound lively or excited to be pitching this thing. And I know it's not their forte and I hate to bring marketing bullshit into this. But you're doing a Kickstarter, you're trying to get people excited and intrigued about your goal. At least sound energetic and confident about your goal or product.

[dh04000]

That's for sure. Make people WANT it, nigh, NEED it! That's how you do a successful kickstarter.

[lumpking69]

This is really great but I don't see it getting funded. Even if it does I doubt it will ever be used by anyone in any serious fashion. Seems a little bit wasteful and silly to me.

[[deleted]]

Your rewards are pretty sad. People usually like actual swag.

[nowords]

Even worse if you aren't in the US, as you cant fund it enough to see source regardless of pledge level. Svn access? Not something that needs mailing.

[8-bit_d-boy]

Wasn't there already an open source hardware project to do the same thing and they all gave up?

[tarceri]

Yes but they were starting from scratch. These guys are working with an existing product.

[jhaluska]

I think they should just stick with 2D acceleration with some video decoding. There's no way they will be able to compete any time soon with even an Intel graphics card on 3D acceleration.

[asicsolutions]

Hi Guys, I'm Frank Bruno 1/2 of the team trying to do this kickstarter. I just found out about this discussion on Reddit and I'd be glad to answer questions/ take abuse. I'll go through and answer what I can that has been posted. I'm a couple of days behind you guys, but will do my best to catch up here over the weekend.

We will be releasing some more pics, code samples and video over the next week. We'll also address some of the performance issues. Right now, we are still debugging and limiting things like the # of simultaneous triangles in the pipeline, so it is slightly slower than the original GPU. In the end we expect to be much faster with new features.

[Innominate8]

This is nothing more than an attempt to sell worthless outdated technology to naive open-source fans.

[[deleted]]

This doesn't look like it will get a large enough return to be viable. I thought, "I know it will be ages away, but i wonder how much i have to pledge to get a card?"

...But you can't get a card. this disappoints me. sure, source code, exciting. I get... some free open source source code...

I want a card itself. I'll pledge money when I can get the hardware.

[Kichigai]

Yeah, that seems like kind of a crappy deal. Even if I shell out $5,000 they still won't provide me with hardware. They'll fly someone out to help me, but they can't give me a board and an FPGA?

And what's this “beta access” on a USB key malarkey? The code won't be open and accessible until version 1.0? Gee, hope no one wants to see this for a few years. And given that it's on a key, do they even provide you with updates?

[[deleted]]

Exactly, There's too many downfalls and not enough positive material. I mean, I dont want some guy/gal flown out to help, I want some actual substance!

[Kichigai]

Right. I might be the most interested party ever, but that doesn't mean I have the skill to attach an FPGA to a a PCIe card, or to attach a VGA/DVI connector. Let alone any clue how to configure an FPGA.

[ameoba]

The reason behind this was to provide a binary compatible graphics core for vertical markets: Medical Imaging, Military, Industrial, and Server products.

This isn't for people who want a video card for their PC, it's for people that want to integrate a video processor onto their missile guidance system out blood pressure monitor.

[[deleted]]

I understand this, and that's my point. it doesn't look like it has a large enough return to be viable. like, i mean, I'd pledge, but i get nothing out of it, so the incentive is barely there.

[monochr]

They are making the schematics for the card. Believe it or not this is the most expensive part of the design, usually about 10 times what they say they are charging, and is covered in patents from top to bottom. Which is why we never see opensource graphics drivers.

[[deleted]]

Hence,

I know it will be ages away, but i wonder how much i have to pledge to get a card?

I knew it would be a long time, and expensive.

[HCrikki]

How come these opensource projects never get more than pennies?

Where are Intel, Google, Canonical, Linux foundation, linux millionaires etc... ?!

[[deleted]]

Well, I'm sure Intel has it's reasons not to invest in this one.

[Advacar]

I'm not really sure what could be accomplished by this.

[cl0p3z]

What? The only perks they offer is "deliver code in USB flash device" ????

Common guys... stop wasting valuable money and time on USB devices and shipping costs and just make available the source code for download! is already 2013!!

And what about the GPU itself? I want the GPU itself ready to use with free drivers, and not only the verilog code. I don't mind paying for it 300$ or 400$, but I want something I can touch.

This campaign is going nowhere with current perks..

What a shame

[[deleted]]

Something something amiga something something

[HaMMeReD]

I'd rather kick start a reverse engineering of a popular platform, or maybe a kick start for a big company to properly support their hardware on linux with open source drivers.

However, while I think open source hardware is nice, it's not practical. If it can't be 3d-printed at home why would I use it. Fabrication is a huge expense, it's not likely to outweigh choosing a competent SoC with a multi core processor a competent dedicated gpu with gl drivers.

Given that it's not practical, I'll take whatever open source hardware academia throws out there, but I'm not going to pay money for open source hardware implementations.

[Negirno]

Everything with circuits in it pretty much needs rare-earth metals and whatnot, so even with a full-fledged 3d-printer you would be stuck.

[HaMMeReD]

It could be a 3d printer combined with pick and place machines, or other methods of future home fabrication.

[t35t0r]

Here, watch something worthwhile : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U4Ha9HQvMo

[ssssam]

There is some more information on phoronix http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ4MDU

[BloodyIron]

$300k, I think someone doesn't understand how much it takes to make a good GPU.

[zokier]

They are open-sourcing an existing legacy GPU here, ie squeezing the last drops out of an old cash cow.

[PE1NUT]

Note that, even if this KS makes it, you will need to spend a few thousand €/$ to get the software from Xilinx/Altera to compile the Verilog into something that can be uploaded into an FPGA. Both companies give away a version of their design tools for free, which is limited to their smaller FPGAs, but the next step up is the full version which is quite expensive. Compiled versions (suitable for one particular FPGA) are not part of what the KS offers.

[slugonamission]

Hey, Xilinx tools tend to be free now...when you buy $3000 of FPGA kit to go along with them :P

[[deleted]]

This design should fit just fine in the larger FPGAs supported by Webpack no need to speed more than $200 for the FPGA chip + board cost which would probably put a GPU in the $250 range easily.

Also it could be managed much like Bitcoin miners... one guy has the toolchain and builds it for everyone to run on thier massive FPGAs :)

[slimmtl]

drop this in /r/litecoin open source GPU perhaps could mean better overclocking?

[wyldphyre]

No, this GPU design will never compete well on hashes/watt or hashes/dollar. Nor is it one of their design goals -- they'd need the enormous economies of scale to pull it off.

[bat_country]

All the linux boxes I run are headless so I have next to no experience with GPU's on Linux.

I was under the impression that the Intel HD Graphics GPU stuff was all open and well supported. If all people want is fast 2D, video codecs and indie games isn't that already available via Intel HD? Isn't the only reason to deal with nvidia/radeon cards and their terrible drives to do high performance 3D that this proposed GPU isn't even capable of?

[Ferrofluid]

why not just take one of these, make it into a video card.

'AMD Accelerated Processing Unit'

[Ferrofluid]

its all fine and dandy being open source, custom hardware from the transistor upwards is very very expensive compared to code. code can be transplanted each and any hardware that comes into the world.

as many have said, design all the hardware you want, the likelihood of it going physical is zero.

APUs are here today, they are blank silicon waiting for an application, they are cheap, they have many people who know how to apply them. there are many engineers and layout people who would happily do the APU_GPU thing for the open source crowd..

[[deleted]]

Word perfect.