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From: rstewart@megatek.UUCP (Rich Stewart)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Let's pretend (i860 graphics unit)
Keywords: Intel, 586, windows
Message-ID: <866@wizard.megatek.uucp>
Date: 19 Dec 90 18:09:33 GMT
References: <3042@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Dec18.082623.16648@kithrup.COM> <3058@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Dec19.060521.16051@iecc.cambridge.ma.us>
Organization: Megatek Corporation, San Diego, California
Lines: 20

In article <1990Dec19.060521.16051@iecc.cambridge.ma.us> johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes:
>-- Graphics support of various kinds.  The 860 has a little support for
>ray tracing, with some instructions that make it easy to whiz through your
>data structures and figure out what obscures what.  One might also like some
>support for bit-aligned bit-blits, though that tends to tie up the data bus
>and so would be far more useful if it had some separate path to memory, at
>least to video memory, that didn't lock out the CPU.
>
>-- 
>John R. Levine, IECC, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 864 9650
>johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us, {ima|spdcc|world}!iecc!johnl
>"Typically supercomputers use a single microprocessor." -Boston Globe

What on the i860 supports ray tracing? It has limited z buffer support,
multiple pixel output, and some color interpolation support.

Back to the 586, block operations, pixel functions, and plane operations
would all be real nice to support a generic window concept.

-Rich