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.

 

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

 

i can't get into that ftp server
always says connection lost

 

can someone tell me whats the name of the video that has anything on bitboys card?

 

Try this. It is the video about BB´s mobile devices.

ftp://ftp.asmparty.net/pub/seminars/

010802_2000_Graphics hardware for handheld devices.wmv

(english, 113 MB)

 

okay go it
hmmmm nothing much interesting though

 

One interesting slide :

All of this should be compared with :

Some MBX Details :

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

MBX Prototype :



MBX demo screenshots :







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, 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:

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

A slide from the BB presentation:

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?

 

17,000 views ... whoa...

 

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).

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.

 

So when will we see a card to buy? I'm anxious as can be.

 

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.

 

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.