Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!bloom-beacon!snorkelwacker!paperboy!husc6!genrad!decvax!savax!thompson
From: thompson@savax.UUCP (thompson mark)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: (B) 68040 vs. gfx coprocessor
Message-ID: <1123@savax.UUCP>
Date: 6 Feb 90 14:44:46 GMT
References: <633@xdos.UUCP> <3046@pur-phy> <9586@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Reply-To: thompson@savax.UUCP (thompson mark)
Organization: Sanders Associates Inc., Nashua, NH
Lines: 39

In article <9586@cbmvax.commodore.com> daveh@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) writes:
>>Since so many workstations and graphics coprocessor cards seem to use
>>the TI DSP chips, why pay the extra cost to have an 040 replace the blitter?
>
>Well, they actually use the TI 320 family graphics processors, which are 
>reasonably general purpose CPUs optimized for graphics processing.  The 16 bit
>version of this is on the Amiga graphics card being worked on by Rich Miner's
>group at the University of Lowell.  A chip like this can currently do lots of
>display stuff that would require a far more expensive general CPU.

I believe you mean the TI 340 family....specifically, the 34010

>TI also makes other interesting CPUish chips, like DSPs, but they're something
>entirely different.

This is the TI 320 family (some very nice parts I might add).

>You wouldn't pick a DSP as a blitter replacement, most are probably
>less well equipped at handling bit-aligned operations than some general
>purpose CPU.  But if you did lots of image or sound processing on that nice
>graphics display, a good DSP would certainly be something nice to have around.

Especially for a 3D rendering accellerator. A TI 320C30 would do very well.
However, I think such an application would work much better if the 320C30
was an entirely separate processor (not a coprocessor) working out of its
own memory which the Amiga could DMA display lists into.

On a slightly different note....I heard someone state that the ULowell
board will probably never come to market because of some very expensive
processors on the board. I think they might be confused with the ULowell
image processing board for the Amiga. This board used several (I think 5)
NEC pipelined image processor chips. These are relatively expensive and
esoteric parts. The graphics board uses a TI 34010. These are plentiful
and cheap (not to mention rather low performance).
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|      Mark Thompson                                                     |
|      decvax!savax!thompson       Designing high performance graphics   |
|      (603)885-9583               silicon today for a better tomorrow.  |
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