few Pictures... (no one interested though...)

any specific specs on this chips???
and is this the avalanche chip which was supposed to come out last year but didn't???
 
The ultimate team--BitBoys and John Romero!

PDA games will never be the same again!!!

(sorry, that's the martinis talking)
 
1) I can't really comment on Bitboys specific plans. I will say though that a goal of Bitboys has always been to deliver a high-end graphics part and that they are certainly capable of such. On the other hand, a company needs to survive to and to do that they sometimes need to do different projects to keep them alive so that they can do what they want.

2) Infineon made the chips currently out. There won't be any other production of these chips.

3) I can't comment on specs other than 12 megs of EDRAM. This chip was code-named Axe.
 
L233 said:
Dave said:
2) Infineon made the chips currently out. There won't be any other production of these chips.

Why ist that? Was that decision made by BBs or by Infineon?

Infineon lost major money (100million) in one quarter, so they scaled back and killed all their embeded-memory production lines.

--|BRiT|
 
OK. The video is now available. Head on to ftp.asmparty.net There´s also some other interesting videos :)
 
One interesting slide :

Bitboys solution - Hardware

- Hardware acceleration of vector graphics content
- Polygon rendering
- convex and concave, self intersecting polygons with holes
- Anti-aliasing
- Cubic and quadratic bezier curve tessellation
- Back buffer, allows double buffering
- Transparency
- Textures

All of this should be compared with :

Some MBX Details :

http://www.powervr.com/Release.asp?ID=38

MBX Prototype :

mbx2.jpg


MBX demo screenshots :

mbxdragon.jpg


mbxvase.jpg


mbxvillagemark.jpg


For those wondering : Yes that would be Villagemark as you all know it from the PC ;)
 
That is pretty naughty of you Kristof.. stealing some of the limelight the BB's are enjoying in this thread with your teasing of MBX.

;)
 
Kristof said:
One interesting slide :

Bitboys solution - Hardware

- Hardware acceleration of vector graphics content
- Polygon rendering
- convex and concave, self intersecting polygons with holes
- Anti-aliasing
- Cubic and quadratic bezier curve tessellation
- Back buffer, allows double buffering
- Transparency
- Textures

All of this should be compared with :

Some MBX Details :

http://www.powervr.com/Release.asp?ID=38

Kristof, I got the impression after sawing the video presentation, that the two solutions only compete partially and therefore shouldn't be compared that easily directly.

BBs chip appeared to me like more built for future cellular phones (all the MMS, SVG stuff) which is the real ("lower end") mobile mass market, while ARM (http://www.arm.com/armtech.nsf/html/MBX3D?OpenDocument) advertised MBX for use in:

PDA
High-end Wireless Information Device (WID) or Smartphone
Automotive infotainment systems
Set top box
Hand-held games console
Games console, gaming-enabled DVD player or gaming-enabled digital TV

which is the more "higher end" mobile market for me. The specification of the chips tell the same story:

MBX HR-S

480K gates (640K gates with optional VGP)
80MHz operation in 0.18µm process
Over 120MHz operation in 0.13µm process
300-500 mega pixel/sec effective fill rate
2-2.5 million triangle/sec rendering rate
Suited to QVGA (320x240) up to VGA (640x480) resolution screens
<1mW/MHz in 0.13µm process and <2mW in 0.18 µm process
Optional VGP TnL floating point geometry engine

MBX R-S

275K gates
80MHz operation in 0.18µm process
Over 120MHz operation in 0.13µm process
150-250 mega pixel/sec effective fill rate
1-1.5 million triangle/sec rendering rate
Suited to QCIF (176x144) up to QVGA (320x240) resolution screens
<0.7mW/MHz in 0.13µm process and <1.5mW in 0.18 µm process

A slide from the BB presentation:

Design constraints

Physical
- Power is (almost) everything in handheld devices
<100 Kgates available for graphics acceleration
10Ms gates in lastest PC graphics chips (100x more)
- Clock frequency <30MHz
- Physical dimensions of the device limit options for additional chips
Display and Image
- Small display size
- 12-16 bit color
- Close viewing distance, relatively large pixels:
anti-aliasing is a requirement

Your achievement with/the design of MBX is marvelous, but I would say the two chips don't play in the same league. Or do you see MBX being used in cellular phones next year?
 
Kristof,

Have there been (or are there any upcoming) announcements of products using the MBX core - obviously excepting the ARM deal?
 
Reverend said:
17,000 views ... whoa...

yeah, Bitboys are just BS'ers and no one is interested about them... ;)


Just met Mika Tuomi... things are getting very nice twist in near future... you can forget Infineon alright...
 
Nexus said:
Your achievement with/the design of MBX is marvelous, but I would say the two chips don't play in the same league. Or do you see MBX being used in cellular phones next year?

MBX comes in many shapes and forms, pubicly known as : MBX Pro, MBX and finally MBX Lite. They are off-the-shelf 3D, 2D and video acceleration cores: MBX Pro for very high-performance high-end 2D/3D graphics enabled set-top boxes and home entertainment systems; MBX with best area/performance for power-critical handheld devices and mainstream set-top boxes; and MBX Lite for the most power-critical cost-sensitive entry-level mobile applications.

One thing to keep track of is that the capabilities of the processors themselves is increasing to such a level that "extremely" low-end graphics acceleration might have very little to add (borders on graphics deceleration).

I can't give out specifications for MBX Lite, don't think they are on the public website, and we don't have real specs for the BitBoys Part.

Given the presentation it sounds like the bitboys chipset is actually an accelerated vector graphics core, meaning it can draw edge antialiased (flat?) polygons. During the presentation it was mentioned that ZBuffers were too expensive, and advised developers to sort the polygons themselves (expensive ?) and later this was again mentioned saying that sorting was also important for AA methods which are sort dependent. This sounds like edge antialiased polygon drawing using some kind of cheap edge coverage technique which is sort dependent (think of a simplified version of Matrox FAA). Any other views on this ? I am also wondering how a potentially completely ZBuffer-less solution will fit in with OpenGL-ES (check Siggraph presentation for details on that).

Dee said:
Have there been (or are there any upcoming) announcements of products using the MBX core - obviously excepting the ARM deal?

There are press releases indicating deals with Hitachi, Intel and ARM. These are chip level deals, custommers of these chips are usually not announced because these companies often don't want to reveal what technology their products are based on (Just as an example: It is a "Nokia" phone, not an ARM+MBX+X+Y Phone) and its quite early to announce that kind of products.

If you want product announcements check this :

http://www.imgtec.com/News/PressReleases/SammyToUsePowerVRBasedSystemOnChip.asp

Note all just my views and guesses, not company view or anything.
 
You'll never see an MBX "card". Maybe the next palm will have one, or the next WinCE...

On a only vaguely related note:
Kristof, knock some heads in your sales department and get them to answer my emails.
 
RussSchultz said:
Reznor007 said:
What are the markings(chip number/etc.) on the Altera BGA?

EP20K400CB652c7

It has 400K gates, which doesn't necessarily translate to 400K gates on an ASIC(generally its less). Its fairly high speed, and really really expensive. Certainly just for development.

Believe me, I know Altera's stuff is expensive. I have 2 Altera Apex EP20K600EBC652-2 's sitting on the desk in front of me. Although 1 of them is beyond any means of repair(half the pins on the bottom are ripped off, and a corner was cut/torn off), the other is fine.
 
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