NDAs Re: [Beowulf] Nvidia, cuda, tesla and... where's my double floating point?

[Jim Lux]

Quoting Bill Broadley <bill at cse.ucdavis.edu>, on Mon 16 Jun 2008  
05:51:21 PM PDT:

>
>
>> parties in GPU programming;
>> considering the amount of computing power they need, for the same   
>> budget they can also make their own CPU's.
>
> Even assuming man months of highly paid programmers I don't see how you
> get from that cost to the budget for making your own CPU.

There are some open source CPU cores in VHDL for things like the SPARC  
V8 around, if you want to try this out.  There's also open source VHDL  
bus interfaces, memory, etc.

Get yourself a copy of the appropriate tools and an appropriate FPGA  
eval board, and you're off and running.

Once you have a solid design in FPGA, there are a number of fabs that  
will take it and turn it into a (faster, smaller, lower power) ASIC,  
with some form of guarantee (i.e. if it works in FPGA, and you follow  
their design rules, you're guaranteed a working ASIC).  They do the  
fabs as multiproject wafers (like MOSIS)

Typical overall cost is in sub $100K range, from what I understand.