Wave Issue 9802 3/23/98 Article 2-01

***Story of the Issue

GigaPixel Launches with IP Business Model, Deal and High
Quality Level for the Mainstream 3D Market

A start-up company, GigaPixel, brings a different approach
to supplying 3D technology to the PC industry. Founded on
not supplying chips but IP (Intellectual Property) for
others to reduce to silicon GigaPixel could shape another
facet of the 3D industry – fabless chipless suppliers. At
4th Wave we feel this will become an increasingly important
segment of the industry as the PC on a chip becomes a
reality.

GigaPixel was founded on the premise that SGI Infinite
Reality quality and performance can to be brought to the PC
by rethinking the conventional 3D architecture. The
feasibility of such an approach was based on the over 50
person-years of experience at SGI now on the team at
GigaPixel. The engineering team has implemented a number of
3D designs where they have learned not only the a
significantly better way of implementing 3D, but more
importantly they feel the traditional tradeoffs that
sacrifice quality or performance have been eliminated.

For example, the algorithms for shading 3D pixels are fairly
well understood and are implemented in a number of designs
today. This is not the issue. The key problem to solve to
provide high quality, high performance 3D graphics is the
reduction of memory bandwidth. This is the most significant
innovation in the GigaPixel GP-1 core for which there are a
number of patents that have been filed.

GigaPixel utilizes a region based architecture. Region based
architectures have been around for some time, even prior to
the highly publicized Talisman initiative from Microsoft. Up
to now, region based architectures have been plagued with
incompatibility issues including the requirement for
presorting triangles on the host, difficulties with
transparency, issues with mixing 2D and 3D operations, and
the requirement for the application to be aware of the
underlying architecture, just to name a few. GigaPixel
developed an architecture which addresses all of these
incompatibilities and provides the benefits of a region
based architecture. GigaPixel requires no special
considerations by applications or any special processing by
the host. The application interface to the architecture is
exactly the same as any conventional architecture.

The bandwidth reduction provided by the GigaPixel design is
up to 50 times over the more conventional approaches.
Regions of geometry are read out of external memory. The
processing of that region is done entirely on chip with the
resulting pixels written out to the frame buffer. Another
component of the GigaPixel architecture is that it provides
significant bandwidth reduction in setting up triangles and
drawing the final visible pixels. The intelligent algorithms
inside the core only perform the setup calculation on
visible triangles. Additionally only the final visible
pixels are drawn into the frame buffer. A single GP-1 Core
can produce effectively 4 pixels per clock that are texture
mapped, trilinear filtered, full scene anti-aliased, and Z
buffered. Multiple GP-1 Cores can be integrated into a
single design resulting in performance levels not yet seen
in the industry.

The business model of GigaPixel is that of an IP provider
which is focused on 3D technology in both hardware and
software. The GigaPixel strategy is to not incur the large
costs associated with producing final silicon, but rather
invest its R&D dollars in the areas where it can make the
largest impact, which is of course designing 3D cores.
GigaPixel works closely with its partners to integrate the
core with existing 2D/Video technologies to deliver a
complete graphics solution. GigaPixel will also provide the
underlying drivers to support the implementation. The
company already has one customer and are negotiating with
several others. First silicon is expected to tape out in
August with silicon for demonstration by its first customer
by COMDEX.

Keith Uhlin
VP Business Development
GigaPixel Corporation
2350 Mission College Blvd., Suite 800
Santa Clara, CA 95054
(408)654-8005

www.gigapixel.com