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From: daglem@solan7.solan.unit.no (Dag Lem)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Blitter Speed(?)
Message-ID: <1990Oct22.195001.28782@idt.unit.no>
Date: 22 Oct 90 19:50:01 GMT
Sender: news@idt.unit.no (Usenet news admin)
Reply-To: daglem@solan7.solan.unit.no (Dag Lem)
Organization: Norwegian Institute of Technology
Lines: 22

(Re)Hi hardware gurus!
Sorry if you've read this before, but I've got no ANSWERS.

I have two questions on blitter speed, please answer them if you can:

Would it be theoretically possible to make new custom chips that run at, say, 28MHz cycles, and to make the chip-RAM follow this speed? 

Could the pipelining in the blitter be improved to make it blit one word in two cycles, instead of todays four cycles (simple blits)? 

I ask these questions because I've written routines in assembly using the blitter to draw filled polygons, and it P*SSED ME OFF to see the blitter using one frame just to clear four bitplanes. A 68040 running at 7MHz would do this just as fast, no? Heck maybe even the 68030 in the Amiga 3000 can compete with the blitter, having 32 bit access to chip memory.

Seems to me the blitter is getting old. 
If the blitter could run at 28MHz, 2 cycles per word (8 times faster), we could all forget about other computers. Is it possible???? Anybody??? Dave Haynie?????

PLEASE!!!!!!

-- 
    __                /                        | Shorter of breath
   /  \  __   __     /   ___  _ _              | and one day closer to death.
  /    |/  / /  /   /   /__/ / / /             |   -Roger Waters, Time 
 /____/ \_/|/\_/   /____\___/ /  \__________   |    (The Dark Side of The Moon) 
______________/