ckim@esunix.UUCP (Cheol Kim) (07/12/89)
Since the introduction of Intel's very own 1M transister chip, i860, there has been quite a bit of interest. I read somewhere some companies are developing workstations around it. Notably, Megatek was such. Thus, the question is whether there are going to be computers built on it by which company. Also, in its spec, it is said that ,using its special graphics instructions, 21 million Gouraud shaded pixels with Z-buffer can be processed. The question is how they derive such number. I am sure that there are many of you who have gotten weary at this type of guessing. However, if you have spare brain cells to dwell on this subject, it would be interesting. I suspect that ,as it is said, they are pixels not polygons. This probably means that scan-line information needs to be processed beforehand. Given 10x10 polygons, it can do 210K polygons at its peak rate. This does not include transformation and other house keeping such as dealing with edge pairs and all. Also, since i860 uses the write-back scheme for caching, is there a possibility to realize a multi-processor scheme for different types of graphics algorithms? cheol living off the edge in the land of national parks.