[rescue] OT: Games and workstations (was OT: Linux and USB on Intel)

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
>
> Err, how did the manage to do that?  I thought a megabyte was a
> megabyte, was a megabyte.  And I've never heard SGI mention megawords of
> TRAM.

Because TRAM is not actually just memory :). TRAM is pretty much the
texturing portion of the OpenGL pipeline in HW... each TRAM does parallel
texture/image, and MIP mapping interpolations.

The problem is that people said 1MB or 4MB of TRAM, which is wrong (SGI
used the lingo because everybody was doing it)... but rather the correct
definition would be: The system has 1 or 4 TRAMs :). Actually I was wrong,
it was not 4MB but actually 8MB per TRAM (plus 60K logic gates per TRAM
module). Hoewever those 8MB per TRAM are not accesible/mapped directly, I
think you can address them as only 1MB (don't know exactly why, maybe
because you keep 4/8 channels per texture "byte" so maybe the memory is
not "channel" addresseable).

Just another confussing SGI term :)