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

[Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com>]

Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Timothy Miller wrote:
> 
>>Ok, so, how about this idea:
>>
>>- Small Xilinx FPGA, 16M of RAM, and a DAC on a board.
>>- AGP 2X
>>- Up to 2048x2048 resolution at 8, 16, and 32 bpp.
>>- Acceleration ONLY for solid fills and bitblts on-screen.
> 
> 
> Sounds OK to me.

To you.  But if you are the only customer, that doesn't make for very 
large sales volumes.

> 
> 
>>Given that so little is accelerated, there is no point in putting more
>>than the viewable framebuffer on the card, hense the 16 megs.  It would
>>probably actually HURT performance to cache pixmaps on the card.
>>
>>
>>Oh, there's one thing I forgot.  It would have to support VGA.  There is
>>a VGA core on opencores.org that we could use, but its logic area would
>>probably push up the FPGA cost so that the board was in the $100 range.
>>  Probably more.
> 
> 
> Why support legacy VGA? It makes things more complex and expensive, and doesn't
> give us much, especially for a SoC.

It's all about console support in a PC.

BTW, What is SoC?