[Open-graphics] Press release, VGA project, need to make progress

[Timothy Normand Miller]

On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 7:13 AM, Dieter <netbsd at sopwith.solgatos.com> wrote:

>> But we need to think of things that make us say "I'd pay
>> $1500 to be able to do that specific thing better."  They can be
>> relatively niche applications, though.  I spoke with someone at Pixar,
>> and unfortunately, hardware acceleration of rendering isn't
>> interesting to THEM because it's so much easier to just add more CPUs
>> to their rendering farm.
>
> Is there something OGD1 could do to enhance medical images?  X-rays,
> MRI scans, ...

Lots of things.  Zoom, rotate, windowing and leveling, high bit-depth
grayscale, various convolution filters, etc.

> Some other high-value imaging use?  The app would need to be something
> that the FPGA could do faster and/or cheaper than CPU/GPU.

Anything that can benefit from huge amounts of parallelism or which is
going to be much faster to get to a monitor (or other I/O device)
directly from on-card memory.

> What do customers do with those other FPGA products?  Would OGD1
> be a better choice for any of them?

I'm sure.  We just need to figure out what those application areas
are.  If we had a bigger library of IP that we could license, that
would certainly help.  I'm surprised no one's come after our PCI
controller yet, given how expensive the alternatives are.  On the
other hand, memory controllers tend to be "free" with many FPGAs.


-- 
Timothy Normand Miller
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti
Open Graphics Project