Programmable engine

[Greebe]

Knirfie what gives you that impression? Inside info?

[Ali]

I wasnt talking abaout having a socket, a simple EEPROM update to the programable GPU.

I did a little microprossessor work when at school, and used Atmel gear. You just flash your .asm to the eeprom and your processor suddenly acts differently. should be as simple to implement as a BIOS update.

Ali

[RedRed]

I remember having this discussion long, long ago.... when we hadnt heard of parhelia.... Socketed chips were struck out because they cant work reliably at the bus speeds required, and cost considerably more to produce & mount, for little benefit.

I remember having the discussion about a programmable gpu before, and I think it was Casey who pointed out that the overhead in making a completely programmable gpu was terrible.... you could not hope to come close to the performance. One thing that had popped out was perhap some sort of 'library' which could load into the gpu which might optomise the GPU to handle some specific task (depending upon what it was called to do at a particular time), T&L one time, Triangle the next.... (a von neuman GPU, if you will...) This was shot down too.... generally poor performance relative to dedicated circuitry, i think....

My tuppence....
RedRed

[efty]

programable gpu

Actually depending on the granularity of the operation to be performed having a programable part of the gpu can be helpful.

This is currently a hot topic of research compining fixed function cpus and programable. It has it benefits but I seriously doubt it that it would make its first appearance in the graphics market.

Have a look here

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/research/i...rc_for_gp.html

[Wombat]

Having some sections as "programmable" may be useful, but that's the kind of thing that can be done at runtime, by drivers, no need for EEPROM.
Having a fully programmable unit would limit you to slower electronics.