[rescue] Wow, 30k Graphics Card From Sun

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 01:55:51PM -0400, Michael Dombrowski wrote:
> http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2002-07/sunflash.20020722.2.html 
> 
> Big monies.

I fail too see what makes them think it will soundly beat a IR3.

Oh, and they say 1gig of texture ram, but I bet that in reality it is
effectively going to act like it is closer to 256.  Base on their
description, it sounds like the system will need to duplicate some
textures (perhaps a lot of textures) between the different texture
rams.  Perhaps they are sharing the texture memory between processors
though. 

Also, I don't see anything mentioned about 16bit color, or more than 2
displays per pipe, and you are limited to only 2 pipes.

OK, so this is a nice card.  But for crying out loud.  Reading this
release is like reading an Intel release where they claim to be faster
than other platforms because they can do more 32bit FLOPS in a certain
amount of time than other platforms can do 64bit FLOPS.

BTW, the IR4 is out now.  A single IR4 pipeline can drive 8 displays.
Up to 16 pipes are allowed.  Hideously expensive of course, but they
won't say how much.  And it still doesn't match the amount of texture
memory than an O2 can have, but by chaining multiple pipes...  I don't
know if you can get away with that for expanding the textures to be
used for rendering 1 volumetric object.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd