26 Oct
2018
26 Oct
'18
4:26 p.m.
Two design wins I remember:
TrueVision, the AT&T computer graphics people that did the TARGA video boards had
software to back the board sales up, a 3D animation package TOPAS.
Beautiful, but dog slow even on the fastest 25MHz PCs at the time, so they had ported it
to the i860 as an add in card. I think render frame rates went from minutes to a few
seconds. I used TOPAS under DOSBox on a current PC, and it screams. Its up on Vetusware
if your interested.
The famous graphic supercomputer hardware war, Ardent / Stellar, the later merge and
purchase by Kubota had two applications, Dore' and Advanced Visualization System,
AVS.
These impressive machines were canned, and Kubota came out with a i860 desktop for
graphics. I remember the introduction in Houston, and the 3D geophysicists and petro
exploration guys were all over it. the graphics demos and computation capability was
amazing.
I never knew what happened to that workstation.
________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of emanuel stiebler via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2018 5:55 AM
To: Chuck Guzis; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: modern stuff
On 2018-10-25 14:48, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
While this was a failure on a spectacular level, it
was by no means the
only misstep by Intel. The i860 RISC CPU at one time was even being
endorsed by BillG as a possible personal computer basis.
the i860 found at least a little niche on graphics boards, so somehow
not a complete failure ;-)