zs04+@andrew.cmu.edu (Zachary T. Smith) (09/01/89)
A subject really vaguely related to all this is something I remember hearing about 2 years ago, I think. It was the idea of putting some blit logic (logic unit, barrel shifter, registers) inside of a VRAM chip. Instead of having a graphics processor read out all of the bits (word by word), blit it with whatever, then write them back in, you just put the shifting/masking/operational logic inside of the VRAM itself. The internal blitter does only a few reads and a write per blit operation. Performance would be up to (for a monochrome bitmap, 1k by 1k, 160ns/access, 3 different accesses per op) about 2 x 10^9 pixels/sec, 2 million ops/sec. My question is, did any of the chip companies ever develop this kind of VRAM chip? -Zach T. Smith, zs04+@andrew.cmu.edu