On 24 Jun 2017, at 6:03 AM, Bill Kontos vkontogpls@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 10:48 PM, Mike Leimon leimon@gmail.com wrote:
Honestly, I think that working together with people who are openly developing a GPU design and who would probably be quite welcoming of assistance from Luc would be a much better situation for him than if he went back to trying to working on the lima driver. Perhaps a company like si-five ( https://www.sifive.com/ ) or the risc-v organization might even consider trying to sponsor a collaboration like this as having a good open GPU implementation would certainly be a boon to them in the future.
Anyhow, that is my two cents.
That is a really good idea and luke had mentioned it multiple times in the past but keep in mind that gpus are an extreme patent minefield these days. Heck, intel can't solve some problems like memory compression on their gpus. But maybe someone should propose this to sifive or the risc v foundation. Something like a Berkeley sponsored program would be really interesting.
Please excuse my ignorance in such matters but would it be possible to use a RISC-V or FPGA chip as an interim eGPU until such time that a more specialised chip can be developed and released?
I appreciate that RISC-V/FPGA chips are not likely to be well-suited to the task of GPU processing but perhaps they would be better than no GPU at all.
Once a specialised libre GPU has been developed, the RISC-V / FPGA chips could be repurposed as a CPU for other projects/computers/laptops/etc. and, hence, ensuring that they don't go to waste.
- Bluey