__/ [ Brandon J. Van Every ] on Tuesday 26 December 2006 22:44 \__
>
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>> __/ [ Brandon J. Van Every ] on Tuesday 26 December 2006 20:35 \__
>>
>> > At any rate, I've been opposed to the business model of nightmare
>> > coders throughout my so-called career. It's the main reason I never
>> > got into the mainstream games industry. I think such treatment of the
>> > worker is fundamentally inequitable, a nasty aspect of industrial
>> > capitalism.
>>
>>
>> I can't recall if the study that I have in mind was conducted in the UK
>> alone, but it suggested that 90% (99%?) of people who work in IT dread the
>> thought of coming to work and are nervous about their employment.
>
> Heh, I dread the thought of anything that's even called "IT" ! Maybe
> I'm old school, but back in the day, that was parlance for "stupid
> people who can't cut it in computer science and just push large chunks
> of boring corporate data around." Now, as I've gotten older I've
> realized that's a bit pejorative, but nevertheless, I find the problems
> that "IT" tackles to be fairly dull.
I'm coming from the same place... accepting the term due to persistence and
acceptance through environment/peer pressure and habits. In the UK the term
seems to be a convenient 'umbrella' of which development is just a subset.
So even data entry and pushing papers around could count as IT-ish...
>> >> Introducing the Open Graphics Project
>> >>
>> >> ,----[ Quote ]
>> >> | One project that I've been following quite closely lately is a
>> >> | project started by chip-designer Timothy Miller, called the Open
>> >> | Graphics Project. His goal, along with the rest of the project, known
>> >> | as the "Open Graphics Foundation" is to make a 3D accelerated video
>> >> | card which is fully documented, free-licensed, and open source.
>> >
>> > Can it be manufactured cheaply enough by a knowledgeable individual to
>> > have any relevance? I'm not up on what FPGAs and boards cost nowadays.
>>
>>
>> I suspect that, being an Open Source project, it's the design that counts.
>> Manufacturing is open to whoever wished to derive something from the
>> existing design, royalty-free. Sun has got a GPL-licensed CPU, so imagine
>> just paying for the production of wafers/chips. Intel's chips cost only
>> $29 to manufacture, IIRC, based on something that I read last year.
>
> Yeah but you've gotta have a lotta capital to get that $29/chip. I did
> mean, can it be manufactured cheaply enough by a knowledgeable
> *individual* to have any relevance? Corporations may have their
> reasons for pursuing open source, but so long as they are competing
> against ATI and NVIDIA, for the forseeable future they will lose.
> They'll just be another vendor with the typical problems of execution
> in the marketplace, and we've seen how the 3D graphics market has
> consolidated over the past 10 years. It's only if the individual can
> completely blow off the corporate economics of such undertakings, that
> GPL-ed 3D HW becomes compelling.
The tradeoff in many of these scenarios says that, on the one hand, you want
to fit the most that you can on the dedicated processor/chip, but not allow
vulnerable code to be embedded in hardware that can't be modified (gates
versus flashing). That's one of the reason GPU makers dread the thought of
open-sourcing their drivers and make them more O/S independent
(plug-and-play for Linux, with simple API's and device drivers). Now, what
if you had schematics and designs that are as transparent as Apache and thus
open for peer review? Therein lies a competitive advantage, I think.
Companies could then create sub-modules to mount over, as a branch, and
refine the trunk to suit their own computational tasks. All the argument
which apply to OSS can equally well apply to OSH (hardware) perhaps... it's
not a thorough-y explored area, so maybe somebody can set an example... case
study... role model... whatever.
> Will off-the-shelf FPGAs become cheap, versatile, and powerful enough
> that software implementations of 3D can simply be dropped on top of
> them, and perform well for various classes of 3D problems? Can they be
> competitive with the volume economics of ATI and NVIDIA's offerings,
> which are programmable according to a specific model, if not
> programmable according to any model you can think of? Why shouldn't I
> hand over my $100 to ATI or NVIDIA and call it a day?
The complexity of those is rising, so the price can rise. Never mind the
winking costs of the raw materials and production. You could give them a run
for their money. Just look at all those rising-star chimakers in China...
> For that matter, will IBM Cell chips at some point be manufactured
> cheaply enough, and appear in PC motherboards, and do they strictly
> require graphics cards? It remains to be seen. I don't have a sense
> of their real world performance potential yet.
--
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