i860: Re: modern stuff

[Marc Howard]

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.
> > >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?
> >
>
> That's the board that I have.
>
> Quad i860 on a 9Ux400 VME board.
>
> Its in a Sun 4/280 development system.
>
>
> --
> Michael Thompson
>