***Hot Topics
NVIDIA Discloses Part of Product Road Map
At WinHEC, David Kirk, Chief Scientist, NVIDIA disclosed early
information about its long term road map. Due at the end of
1998 is NV5, described as Next Generation, which will be a
12 million transistor accelerator. Coming in Q4 of 1999 is
NV6, Next Gen2, which is targeted to be a 15 million
transistor device. The relative level of complexity is
illustrated compared with the RIVA 128 at 3 million
transistors and the RIVA TNT at 7 million transistors. Given
the timing of the parts, and NVIDIA’s use of TSMC, we estimate
that NV5 will likely done with .25micron process technology
and NV6 could well be done with .18micron process technology.
PixelFusion Announces Plans
A startup in Bristol England announced plans at WinHEC for its
first product, Fusion, due in mid-1999, based on an
architecture which goes well beyond any in use in mainstream
3D today. In a presentation given my Ray McConnell, the
company described the major bottle necks in current 3D and
even designs for computers. These bottle necks center on the
inability of chip designers to keep up with the rapidly rising
transistor budgets (due to improvements in process
technology), the difficulty in improving the interfaces
between computers and memory and the lack scalable designs. In
response PixelFusion suggests the use of SIMD architectures
which combine processing elements to a level as low as a
single memory cell. Thus, the design of chips will look
increasingly like DRAM with highly regular structures and
paired processing and storage. With the transition the power
of the architecture will be harnessed with programmability. It
is claimed that such an approach will not only do the
conventional 2D operations, 3D including transform and
lighting, procedural texturing but also MPEG encoding. Such an
approach could be seen as the ultimate 3D tile architecture
where each pixel is a tile. Scalability is directly
proportional to the number of transistors on the die. It was
suggested that the first chip would have the following minimum
performance capabilities
11million anti-aliased lit meshed triangles/sec - Peak
1million anit-aliased true Phong shaded bump mapped, MIP-
mapped triangles/sec - Sustained
Multiple Tera Ops/sec memory bandwidth
The business model of the company is to produce the first
product for the high end of the market and license the SIMD
processor core.
www.pixelfusion.com
PixelFusion Limited
2440 The Quadrant
Aztec West
Almondsbury, Bristol
BS32 4AQ
England
44 (0)1454 878740
44 (0)1454 878644 FAX
PC Magazine Establishes New Standard for Workstation
Application Level Benchmark Testing
The February 24, 1998, issue of PC Magazine raises the bar in
the testing of workstations. Users have been asking for tests
which measure the performance of real applications on
workstations. In addition, there has been much conjecture
about how PC workstations compare with traditional UNIX
workstations. For the first time, such tests have been
reported on using a wide range of applications including:
Photoshop, AutoCAD, Pro/Engineer, Softimage 3D, 3D Studio MAX,
AVS/Express and the ZD High-End tests. The WAVE Report spoke
with Nick Stam, Technical Director, Hardware at PC Magazine
and he described the difficulties and many obstacles which had
to be overcome to get the software, load it, operate the
systems and do the testing. For those interested check out the
issue and the web site for more details. 4th Wave has done an
assessment of the test results and interested readers should
send an e-mail request to
jnl@fourthwave.com
For information on the tests go to:
www.pcmag.com
Microsoft Shows Chrome
As a follow-up to its first showing at Meltdown, Microsoft
demonstrated Windows multimedia technology, code-named
"Chrome." Chrome is a future enhancement to the Windows
operating system that enables multimedia content for DVDs, CD-
ROM titles, and Web sites. The demonstration showed how it is
possible to create XML tags for multimedia playback. Two
examples also shown were a game called Riot and HTML being
represented at 3D pages.
Microsoft states that Chrome allows developers to create
interactive DVD, CD-ROM, or Web applications that take
advantage of the underlying PC hardware without having to
write directly to the DirectX APIs. Using XML, developers can
easily describe and deliver multimedia content, and then
dynamically manipulate the content using simple script.
Developers can publish the same Chrome multimedia content on
DVD, CD-ROM, and the Web. The full Chrome feature set is
expected to be available in Q1 1999 and will be available to
Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0 users running Pentium II 350
MHz-class or better systems with AGP. Exact product packaging
and distribution has not been determined.
Wave Issue 9803 3/25/98 Article 1-01