Open Graphics Orders Soon
April 15th, 2008 by CrusaderTimothy Miller, founder of the Open Graphics Project, wrote in to the project’s mailing list with a status report on the project’s efforts to create a GPU chipset with an openly-licensed design (thanks KernelTrap):
The OGD1 design has actually been finished for a couple of months now. In that time, we’ve been chasing a chick-and-egg problem. We can take all the orders we want, but there’s as much as an 8-week lead time between when we place our order for 100 boards and when we get them so that we can test and then ship them. [...] We didn’t want to make a formal announcement for pre-orders until we solved this problem.
We have now solved the problem and are ready to take pre-orders.
The retail price is $1500, but the first 100 pre-orders will get a $100 discount.
[...]
These are pre-orders, not orders. That means the lead time is unpredictable. We don’t have a stock. We will purchase a stock based on the number of pre-orders we get. Also, this means that if we never get a large enough number of pre-orders, we will be unable to fulfill them; all pre-orders would be canceled, and no one would be charged anything.
OGD1 is for hardware hackers. This isn’t just about graphics. If all you wanted was a graphics card that worked with Free Software, we’ve had that for a long time with Matrox, for some time with Intel, and most recently and significantly with ATI.
Additional details are discussed in the e-mail, such as promotional plans.