5 Nov
2018
5 Nov
'18
10:24 p.m.
The i860 seemed to be everywhere in high end graphics for a brief period of time; it seems
like everyone whose graphics had been several ganged Weitek units and their own execution
engine to feed them switched to one or more i860 chips at once. (Wasn?t RealityEngine also
i860?)
Did Intel offer some sort of incentive to do so? Was the chip really all that for its day,
as the contemporary deep dive in BYTE seemed to make it out to be? Or was it just an
attempt to hedge and use something developers hoped would become a commodity with
successive backwards-compatible generations like Intel?s CPUs?
? Chris
Sent from my iPad
On Nov 2, 2018, at 1:53 PM, Marc Howard via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I designed the video section of that board set (VX/MVX). The VX had an
i860 + a very large 32 bit frame buffer. It also had and 2nd 8 bit frame
buffer based two custom Sun chips that was used for the window system. The
video could switch between the two frame buffers on a per-pixel basis. The
output format of the larger frame buffer was micro-programmable; some VXs
were used by Sarnoff Labs in early development of the HDTV standard.
The MVX had four i860s and a very wide (256 bits?) high speed connection to
the VX.
Oh, and the guys that developed the chip set for 2D graphics? They left
and founded a little company called Nvidia. Sigh.
Marc