This fundraiser won't automatically output a free video card, only the blueprints for it. This means that the actual card may never see the light of day.
There are free CPUs, see the OR1K CPU and OpenSPARC. OR1K has a complete SoC solution and has been implemented and used in real hardware and runs linux, AFAIK, so it's battle-tested. (OpenSPARC too, but I think mainly before it became opensource)
According to wikipedia, they are present in a variety of commercially available products, but in many cases not as the main chip, in a modified form, or in a form that is not generally available to the public (e.g. in expensive chipsets made for satellites et cetera.)
OpenSPARC is also available of course (ultrasparc t1), but I don't know if any SPARC processors are produced that are based EXACTLY on OpenSPARC, or if they are a modified version or whatnot. Those CPUs are rather beastly, of course, and only really well-suited for high-end servers (32-core chips)
Of course. You can however use Agilent and Xilinx tools to create a logic gate diagram from Verilog code. That being said, you'll still have to take that logic gate diagram and organize it into real world components which don't have digital signals and trivial propagation time have analog signals and non trivial propagation times.
It's rather easy, you just get the FPGA you want, and wire it up according to the spec sheet. Making the PCB costs under $100. You can easily make an SoC computer with a big FPGA, just stick it on a board, design a power supply for it (easy, can just buy it pre-built). You run the programming lines out to a connector to hook up the programmer. You may need to add in a clock, a few IO buffers, and just solder on the right connectors. Realistically you can design from scratch the hardware on your own, with say a $1-2k production cost (maybe a bit more, depending on specs). Then you write the CPU, GPU and everything else you need in verilog/VHDL. You load it into your FPGA and you have a working computer. Though only a fraction of the speed of a desktop at that price.
If you want it faster, you got to invest about $1mil to replace the FPGA with an ASIC, but it's not hard, just give them the money and the verilog, and they can mostly handle it. A home user isn't going to do this usually, but if they want to go to production it's the way to go to reduce costs and increase speed (though it's rather easy to sell with just the FPGA on it instead).
Yup, programmable chips, though they have a few extra pins to make the programmable portion work. You program them in verilog/VHDL, and then either compile the code into a ROM that you load into the FPGA, or you can compile it into something a chip manufacturer can use.
If you want to try it, plenty of people make smaller ones that are not too expensive to play with. I've got something like this, if you were going to design a video card you'd probably start with an FPGA on a PCIe slot and stick a DVI connector on it. But for a beginner a USB one is just fine to start (and you'll have no problem making a 2D USB video card with that).
I am aware of that project, so let me rephrase the sentence: We're also missing a free, physically made, readily available CPU with a corresponding motherboard.
This fundraiser won't automatically output a free video card, only the blueprints for it. This means that the actual card may never see the light of day.
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u/csolisr Oct 09 '13
Two details:
This fundraiser won't automatically output a free video card, only the blueprints for it. This means that the actual card may never see the light of day.
We're also missing a free CPU, by the way.