joel@decwrl.dec.com (Joel McCormack) (12/29/89)
WRL Technical Report TN-9 is available. (It actually has been available for some time, but we don't have any kind of formal announcement mailing list in place.) The title and abstract: Smart Code, Stupid Memory: A Fast X Server for a Dumb Color Frame Buffer Processor speeds are improving faster than memory access speeds. The current generation of RISC processors can perform many 2-dimensional graphics operations at memory bandwidth speeds, rendering specialized hardware unnecessary. This paper describes the DECStation 3100 color frame buffer hardware and several of the graphics algorithms used in the X server implementation. Measured performance numbers are presented and compared to memory bandwidth speed, and possible frame buffer improvements are discussed. To get information on how to order this paper, send a message to wrl-techreports@decwrl.dec.com with the single line ``help'' as the message. - Joel McCormack (decwrl!joel, joel@decwrl.dec.com)