alvitar@madhat.UUCP (Phil Harbison) (07/02/88)
I am working on the preliminary design of a workstation that will support X Windows. The primary design goal is to offer respectable performance with a price under $4000 for a diskless, monochrome system. Color must be provided as an option by plugging in extra memory boards or chips. The main CPU will be a MC68030, and the operating system will be derived from UNIX System V, Release 3. I would appreciate comments regarding the following design issues. [1] Which graphics controller chip(set) best supports an X server imple- mentation? I'm currently considering the Texas Instruments TMS34010, the AMD 95C60 Quad Pixelplane Dataflow Manager (QPDM), and the National Semiconductor DP8500 Raster Graphics Processor (RGP). I have the option of putting the graphics subsystem on a separate board, so it might be best to offer both a low cost option and a high performance option. [2] How beneficial is an extra processor dedicated to X server func- tions? Is it necessary if I use one of the programmable devices such as the TMS34010 or the RGP? [3] Since X seems to be IPC intensive, would it make sense to dedicate a processor to running X, the Ethernet, and the keyboard & mouse ports? [4] I have heard that X doesn't port well to systems lacking the select system call. Is the poll call supported by Streams an adequate replace- ment for select? Would we be better off implementing the entire server in a separate processor not running UNIX? [5] I would like to leave hooks for an add-in accellerator. How hard is it to integrate an accellerator, such as the SGI Geometry Pipeline, into a system running X? Please send your response via electronic mail. I will post a summary. -- Live: Phil Harbison USPS: 3409 Grassfort Drive, Huntsville, AL 35805-5421 UUCP: madhat!alvitar PSTN: 205-881-4317 or 205-830-4310x210