2 Nov
2018
2 Nov
'18
1:53 p.m.
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
On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 5:34 AM Michael Thompson via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2018 14:29:18 -0700
From: Eric Korpela <korpela at ssl.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: i860: Re: modern stuff
A Google search on Skybolt i860 produces interesting results.
That's the board that I have.
Quad i860 on a 9Ux400 VME board.
Its in a Sun 4/280 development system.
--
Michael Thompson
Additional realtime signal processing
capability is provided by four Skybolt i860-based VMEbus single-board
computers with 240 MFLOPS peak combined capacity.
--------------
Remember when 240 MFLOPS was a lot?