Two design wins I remember: TrueVision, the AT&T computer graphics people that did the TARGA video boards had software to back the board sales up, a 3D animation package TOPAS. Beautiful, but dog slow even on the fastest 25MHz PCs at the time, so they had ported it to the i860 as an add in card. I think render frame rates went from minutes to a few seconds. I used TOPAS under DOSBox on a current PC, and it screams. Its up on Vetusware if your interested.
The famous graphic supercomputer hardware war, Ardent / Stellar, the later merge and purchase by Kubota had two applications, Dore' and Advanced Visualization System, AVS. These impressive machines were canned, and Kubota came out with a i860 desktop for graphics. I remember the introduction in Houston, and the 3D geophysicists and petro exploration guys were all over it. the graphics demos and computation capability was amazing. I never knew what happened to that workstation. ________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org> on behalf of emanuel stiebler via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, October 26, 2018 5:55 AM To: Chuck Guzis; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: modern stuff On 2018-10-25 14:48, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > While this was a failure on a spectacular level, it was by no means the > only misstep by Intel. The i860 RISC CPU at one time was even being > endorsed by BillG as a possible personal computer basis. the i860 found at least a little niche on graphics boards, so somehow not a complete failure ;-)
