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Kickstarter For Open Source GPU

morgaine

Well, this is a turn-up for the books:  a Kickstarter for "Open Source Graphics Processor (GPU)". !!!

 

There's a lot of "if's" involved, but it's certainly a very interesting idea, and worth exploring for multiple reasons, education and fun among others.

 

OSHW and FPGA enthusiasts having their own GPU would be fascinating! image

 

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PS. I've been wondering whether the Parallella board wouldn't be a nice implementation platform for the programmable pipeline of a modern open-source GPU.  After all, the Epiphany device provides hardware parallelism with fast floating point for the core compute engines of 16 to 64 shaders without having to implement CPUs in Verilog.  The FPGA would then be left to do only the fastest parts of the overall task instead of implementing the programmable shaders that CPUs are best at.

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  • Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    PS. I've been wondering whether the Parallella board wouldn't be a nice implementation platform for the programmable pipeline of a modern open-source GPU.  After all, the Epiphany device provides hardware parallelism with fast floating point for the core compute engines of 16 to 64 shaders without having to implement CPUs in Verilog.  The FPGA would then be left to do only the fastest parts of the overall task instead of implementing the programmable shaders that CPUs are best at.

    I think that'll depend a lot on whether the Epiphany provides the type of operations typically used in GPU's for shaders or stuff like h.264 encode/decode and is fast enough at those particular things.

    While I'm sure it would be possible, is there any point if it ends up being beaten in performance by a $50 mass produced ati/nvidia card ?

     

    Getting decent open source drivers is a worthy goal, but I don't know how feasible the idea is. Most of the problems with GPU's today is to do with the technology/algorithms being wrapped up in patents and intellectual property law suits, not the ability to create the implementation or drivers.

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  • Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    PS. I've been wondering whether the Parallella board wouldn't be a nice implementation platform for the programmable pipeline of a modern open-source GPU.  After all, the Epiphany device provides hardware parallelism with fast floating point for the core compute engines of 16 to 64 shaders without having to implement CPUs in Verilog.  The FPGA would then be left to do only the fastest parts of the overall task instead of implementing the programmable shaders that CPUs are best at.

    I think that'll depend a lot on whether the Epiphany provides the type of operations typically used in GPU's for shaders or stuff like h.264 encode/decode and is fast enough at those particular things.

    While I'm sure it would be possible, is there any point if it ends up being beaten in performance by a $50 mass produced ati/nvidia card ?

     

    Getting decent open source drivers is a worthy goal, but I don't know how feasible the idea is. Most of the problems with GPU's today is to do with the technology/algorithms being wrapped up in patents and intellectual property law suits, not the ability to create the implementation or drivers.

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