Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!oddjob!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Blitters and design philosophy
Message-ID: <46500023@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 6 Aug 88 14:17:00 GMT
References: <62659@<1988Aug1>
Lines: 12
Nf-ID: #R:<1988Aug1:62659:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:46500023:000:669
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald    Aug  6 09:17:00 1988


I have always doubted the value of special purpose hardware, though 
I have been responsible for some real doozies myself. In the vast 
majority of cases, general is better. A recent example from my own
experience: a frient wanted to port a TeX screen previewer I had 
written for the  (very general-purpose) IBM-PC to his whizz-bang
super-dooper graphics Iris 4. One problem - image copies from memory
to the graphics display are real losers on this beast, because they have to
be done essentially one bit at a time. The hardware prevents doing serious
block copies!
There is a function call to do a row at a time , but we suspect it actually
does it pixel by pixel.