HP Visualize B1000 Hardware Manual

An Overview of the VISUALIZE fx Graphics
Accelerator Hardware
Noel D. Scott
Daniel M. Olsen
Ethan W. Gannett
Article 4 1998 Hewlett Packard Company
Three graphics accelerator products with different levels of performance are
based on varying combinations of five custom integrated circuits. In addition,
these products are the first ones from Hewlett-Packard to provide native
acceleration for the OpenGL API.
T
he VISUALIZE fx family of graphics subsystems consists of three
6 4
products, fx , fx
These products are built around a common architecture using the same
custom integrated circuits. The primary difference between these controllers
is the number of custom chips used in each product (see Table I).
Table I
Number of custom chips in the different
VISUALIZE fx products
Product
2
fx
4
fx
6
fx
A chip-level block diagram of the VISUALIZE fx
This is the most complex configuration and also the one with the highest
performance in the product line. The VISUALIZE fx
products use subsets of the chips used in the fx
have support for the optional hardware-accelerated texture map module,
which contains a local texture cache for storage of texture map images. If the
texture accelerator is not present, the bus between the interface chip and the
first raster chip is directly connected.
2
, and fx , and an optional hardware texture mapping module.
Texture Geometry
Chip Chip
—
1
2
28
Raster
Chip
1 2
2 2
3 4
6
product is shown in Figure 1.
4
and the VISUALIZE fx
6 6 4
. The fx and fx subsystems
May 1998 The Hewlett-Packard Journal
2