modern stuff - i860

[Randy Dawson]

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 ;-)