Let's be clear here, this is a toy. Beyond being a fun project to work on that could maybe get my foot in the door were I ever to decide to change careers and move into hardware design, this is not going to change the GPU landscape or compete with any of the commercial players. What it might do is pave the way for others to do interesting things in this space. A board with all of the video hardware that you can plug into a computer with all the infrastructure available to play around with accelerating graphics could be a fun, if extremely niche, product. That would also require a *significant* time and money investment from me, and that's not something I necessarily want to deal with. When this is eventually open-sourced, those who really are interested could make their own boards.
One thing to note that is that while the US+ line is generally quite expensive (the higher end parts sit in the five-figures range for a one-off purchase! No one actually buying these is paying that price, but still!), the Kria SOMs are quite cheap in comparison. They've got a reasonably-powerful Zynq US+ for about $400, or just $350ish the dev boards (which do not expose some of the high-speed interfaces like PCIe). I'm starting to sound like a Xilinx shill given how many times I've re-stated this, but for anyone serious about getting into this kind of thing, those devboards are an amazing deal.
Yeah you're referring to the Linux kernel but software is much cheaper to design, test, build, scale and turn profitable than HW, especially GPUs.
Open source GPUs won't threat Nvidia/AMD/Intel anytime soon or ever. They're way too far ahead in the game and also backed by patents if any new player were to become a thereat.
One thing to note that is that while the US+ line is generally quite expensive (the higher end parts sit in the five-figures range for a one-off purchase! No one actually buying these is paying that price, but still!), the Kria SOMs are quite cheap in comparison. They've got a reasonably-powerful Zynq US+ for about $400, or just $350ish the dev boards (which do not expose some of the high-speed interfaces like PCIe). I'm starting to sound like a Xilinx shill given how many times I've re-stated this, but for anyone serious about getting into this kind of thing, those devboards are an amazing deal.