Forget Developing An FPGA...

[gigabytecoin]

Why don't we focus at least some effort on convincing a small ATI video card manufacture to make a 5870 * 4 core video card with only 256MB of cheap/slow ram?

That could theoretically do about 2.4 Ghps for maybe 600 watts of power. I don't mind plugging in 4 pcie connectors to power it, either.

The 5870 technology is 2 years old already.

All we would need to do would be to come up with about 1,000 initial orders at say $1,000 a pop and I bet we could convince somebody to make a board like that for $1M USD, no?

I would pay $1,000 for a 2.4Ghps card.

[error]

Good gawd. That would be a lot of power, but how do you cool it?

[gigabytecoin]

Good gawd. That would be a lot of power, but how do you cool it?

Not sure, perhaps make it out of more "industrial" materials and forget about temperature? Who cares if it gets to 150C if it's only going to be purchased and operated by "professional miners" ??

[error]

Good gawd. That would be a lot of power, but how do you cool it?

Not sure, perhaps make it out of more "industrial" materials and forget about temperature? Who cares if it gets to 150C if it's only going to be purchased and operated by "professional miners" ??

You can't make "modern" GPUs out of "more industrial" materials. You're talking about 40nm and even smaller processes here to get the performance you see today. These things must be kept (relatively) cool; over 100C for any significant length of time is out of the question unless you're wanting to just fry a bunch of perfectly good hardware.

[dds]

Not sure, perhaps make it out of more "industrial" materials and forget about temperature? Who cares if it gets to 150C if it's only going to be purchased and operated by "professional miners" ??

You can't run 5870 chip at 150C for a long time, no matter what materials are used for other parts of the board.
And 5870 chips are not being produced now, AFAIK.
And you have to get this chips from ATI - it could be a problem for a small company.
And energy efficiency of this solution is much worse than FPGA.

[Garrett Burgwardt]

FPGAs aren't even as good as ASICs.

Crappy idea.

[gigabytecoin]

FPGAs aren't even as good as ASICs.

Crappy idea.

Nobody said that they were mr crappy attitude!

It was just a suggestion to fill the gap between GPUs and ASICs perhaps.