I highly doubt anything in your post that you’ve said would make them change their mind about any of the plans they have so far.

Sorry, but this not a video card. It’s not being sold as such. No, they don’t even have a market at this stage. It’s basically a fund-raiser, being sold as an FPGA development kit, not a video card.

This card does not do anything useful when you receive it. It won’t even display a test image (to my understanding). Hell, you are given a JTAG (I assume) cable so you can synth your own logic onto these otherwise blank FPGAs.

Blank FPGAs means you have a useless board (unless you are an FPGA developer).

And for what it’s worth, reworking for a PCI-e version is much, much more than just redoing the PCB artwork.

My paragraph should have read:

Also — I am not 100% sure that PCI-X cards do work even if you can get them to fit in a PCI slot to start with. Could you please investigate this and advise potential customers on your website – If anything it will help with future purchases if it does conform.

However, having motherboards with PCI-X slots only in our servers does not enable us to test, enjoy and assist you in furthering your great project. As far as I can tell. The Desktop thats your primary target.

Sorry guys, I know you have spent a lot of your own $$$ or masses of time doing this, but PCI-e is the only way to go for the majority of current and new users in Linux-land. Apart from the poor local availability of good performing motherboards, PCI-e has overrun PCI-X and as such PCI-X is treated with much suspect emotions. Most people are aware that PCI-X is not going anywhere fast, and so avoid such devices, preferring PCI-e. Any Linux guru/developer is aware that PCI-e offers much more in bandwidth, scalable performance and software functionality and speed over the static PCI-X interface.

Also — I am not 100% sure that PCI-X cards do work even if you can get them to fit in a PCI-X slot to start with. Could you please investigate this and advise potential customers on your website – If anything it will help with future purchases if it does conform.

Unfortunately my experiences remind me to avoid/forget PCI-X. I have found differences between PCI-X conformance over 2.1, 2.2 h/w standards on some motherboards, so a blanket guarantee of suitability may not be wise. Anyhow, please check this all out with the h/w guru’s; and let us know the results.

I sincerely hope you can re-spin the artwork and integrate a PCI-e interface chip and release a PCI-e board without too much loss in $$$ and time. Then, I would seriously more than consider purchasing such a great card.

I’d be much more interested if this was the case. Still, don’t have $1500 USD to blow right now.

Double negative FTW!

The NRE costs (R+D, masks, etc) for ASIC run to the millions of dollars. The NRE costs for FPGA is a 5-20 thousand to prototype the board. The unit costs of ASIC are much cheaper in volume, but for the per unit costs to break even, you need to sell hundreds of thousands of units.

You can buy a few GeForce 9 Nvidia cards for what this costs.

I remember seeing ISA and PCI card schematics and drivers years back. I think there was PCI circuits posted here too.

could be the start of an amazing open computer hardware movement.it’d be fantastic to see an entirely open-source computer one of these days.