I designed the video section of that board set (VX/MVX). The VX had an i860 + a very large 32 bit frame buffer. It also had and 2nd 8 bit frame buffer based two custom Sun chips that was used for the window system. The video could switch between the two frame buffers on a per-pixel basis. The output format of the larger frame buffer was micro-programmable; some VXs were used by Sarnoff Labs in early development of the HDTV standard.
The MVX had four i860s and a very wide (256 bits?) high speed connection to the VX. Oh, and the guys that developed the chip set for 2D graphics? They left and founded a little company called Nvidia. Sigh. Marc On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 5:34 AM Michael Thompson via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > > Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2018 14:29:18 -0700 > > From: Eric Korpela <korp...@ssl.berkeley.edu> > > Subject: Re: i860: Re: modern stuff > > > > A Google search on Skybolt i860 produces interesting results. > > >Additional realtime signal processing > > > capability is provided by four Skybolt i860-based VMEbus single-board > > > computers with 240 MFLOPS peak combined capacity. > > > -------------- > > > Remember when 240 MFLOPS was a lot? > > > > That's the board that I have. > > Quad i860 on a 9Ux400 VME board. > > Its in a Sun 4/280 development system. > > > -- > Michael Thompson >
