SMedia 3362

[Harald Welte]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2007 at 10:44:20PM +0100, Ian Stirling wrote:
> Shawn Rutledge wrote:
>> On 9/1/07, Raphael Jacquot <sxpert at sxpert.org> wrote:
>>> Shawn Rutledge wrote:
>>>
>>>> Is there any technical info available about this chip?
>>>>
>>>> Is there an X driver for it, or one in progress?
>>>
>>> depending on the timeframe, perhaps FIC could contact or help the
>>> opengraphics people with their project, the goal of which is to create a
>>> graphics controller asic that would be used for embedded systems.
>>> Using the opengraphics asic in the openmoko platform would be, IMNSHO
>>> the proper thing to do
>> Or maybe use an FPGA so we can design our own hardware-accelerated
>> graphics functions, and it can double for some other purposes too.
>> OpenGraphics is starting that way (spartan 3 if memory serves).  They
>> are cheap.  Not sure if they are low-power enough to use in a phone.
>
> Basically.
> FPGAs of equivalent size are _NOT_ cheap, or low power.
> I'd guess the SMedia chip is $20 or so.

and it is multi chip package with 8MB sdram.

> Now, go and look for a low power FPGA with the thick end of a megabyte of 
> embedded RAM, and many thousand gates. It'll be at least $100, maybe $200.

1MB is ridiculously small.

oh, and not even thinking about the many man years it will take to write
the verilog/vhdl for the graphics chip, as well as
verification/testing/...

This project is about building open source communications devices, not
open source graphics chips.  If we want to start building our own
components, then we would have released GTA01 in 2010 and GTA02 in 2014.

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>          	        http://openmoko.org/
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