mithomas@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Michael Thomas Niehaus) (07/20/89)
I thought that this might interest someone:
RADIUS ANNOUNCES QUICKCOLOR GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR
SAN JOSE, CA, July 17, 1989 -- Radius Inc.*, the leading manufacturer of
graphics systems for the Apple Macintosh, announced the Radius QuickColor*
Graphics Accelerator for the Macintosh II family of computers.
By executing Macintosh graphics on a 6 MIPS (million instructions per second
RISC processor, Radius has enhanced the performance of Apple's 32-Bit
QuickDraw up to 600%.
"Radius is dedicated to providing system solutions," said Steve Holtzman,
Radius vice president of marketing. "The Radius QuickColor Graphics
Accelerator, Radius DirectColor* interfaces and a Radius Color Display*
combine to create a color graphics system which delivers the highest
performance and the highest quality display image available on the Macintosh."
QuickColor accelerates common graphics functions such as window movement,
text scrolling, fills and image displays by bypassing the Macintosh II
processor. QuickColor software operates on the system level, allowing
32-Bit QuickDraw applications currently on the market to take advantage of
the speed improvements without modification. The more an application
utilizes QuickDraw, the more QuickColor will enhance that application's
effectiveness.
"Professional graphic artists and publishers who work in 16 and 32-bit
applications will find QuickColor an indispensable productivity tool,"
said Steve Becker, Radius product manager. "Graphics arts, pre-press and
professional color desktop publishing applications which require deep
color modes will benefit enormously from the faster graphics."
QuickColor software contains two portions of code for the RISC (Reduced
Instruction Set Computer) processor. One portion is a multi-tasking Radius
Operating System with routines that implement QuickDraw inner loops. It
gets loaded onto the RISC processor's static RAM on the QuickColor board at
boot time. The Radius Operating System supports multiple, prioritized and
concurrent processes. The second portion of the code patches 32-Bit
QuickDraw at boot time. This process bypasses the Macintosh II processor
for some 32-Bit QuickDraw operations.
To accomplish the acceleration, the QuickColor VL86C010 RISC processor
takes advantage of Macintosh NuBus Block Transfer. In a typical Macintosh
II color display operation image data moves from the Macintosh II processor
across the NuBus to the video RAM on the display interface at rate of about
3.8 megabytes per second. The QuickColor RISC processor reads and writes to
the video RAM at up to 27 megabytes per second, 7 times faster than the
Macintosh processor.
To achieve the QuickColor advantages, Radius designed NuBus Block Transfer
capabilities into the GS/C and DirectColor display interfaces. Together,
the Radius Color Display, display interface and QuickColor form a complete
graphics system.
The Radius QuickColor Graphics Accelerator will ship in July. The list
price will be $795.
________________________________________________________________________
This information is provided to the Developer Services Group at Apple Computer
by the product's developer. Apple cannot warrant any third party's product.
Please consult the Apple Products Library or MENU/Software Library on
AppleLink, or contact the individual company for further information.
________________________________________________________________________
-Michael
--
Michael Niehaus UUCP: <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!mithomas
Apple Student Rep ARPA: mithomas@bsu-cs.bsu.edu
Ball State University AppleLink: ST0374 (from UUCP: st0374@applelink.apple.com)