Re: [OT] Crazy idea: Design open-source graphics chip

[Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com>]

John Bradford wrote:

> 
> If we put 4 or more on each board, it could be useful for betting
> shops, stock markets, shop window displays, and other applications
> where you need to control a dozen or more screens, which basically
> contain textual information, but where 80x25 text mode just isn't
> enough.  I.E. you might want the odd pie chart or different sized text
> or something.

The market for secondary heads is too small.  You can get an ATI Mach 64 
PCI card for pennies and add it as a second head for what you're describing.

For an open-source graphics card to be marketable, it would have to be 
attractive as a primary head used in Linux workstations and servers, and 
it would have to be so in a PC market.

> 
> 
>>Oh, there's one thing I forgot.  It would have to support VGA.
> 
> 
> Maybe not, the primary market for this, (I.E. what makes it cost
> effective to produce, and therefore available for developers to use as
> their primary display), could be users who want to control many
> displays, and who would have a standard VGA card for the primary
> monitor.  (Yeah, it would be kind of ironic if 99% of our amasing new
> graphics cards ended up in mahines with another card as the primary
> display, but then again, if it makes the open hardware available for
> developers to experiment with at a reasonable cost, it would be worth
> doing).

The irony is too much.  Seriously.

> 
> So, what about a PCI card with four or eight 16MB framebuffers, and
> the basic acceleration and other specs you described above.  Is that
> at least slightly feasible, do you think?

Adding extra heads is relatively easy, and you can keep the memory 
unified and do it all in one chip.