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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe C. who wrote (5345)	7/14/1998 10:25:00 PM
From: Frank Sheridan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

A short explanation of what a Quickturn emulator is and why it benefits TDFX. A Quickturn emulator is (to put it simply) a programmable sea of gates realized in hardware. In the real world it looks like a glorified "tower" style P.C. It makes it possible for I.C. designers to create a "virtual machine" in hardware. In other words, once the engineers have finished designing the timing diagrams and electrical schematics (or their Verilog models or whatever..) for their next generation chip they can create an exact model of what they plan to build using the Quickturn machine. The reason that this is good news for TDFX is because it will allow them to diagnose many potential problems in new products before they pay for tooling and fabrication. Also, it will allow them to try some different ideas and simulate them to see if they are worth pursuing. IMHO Quickturn machines are regarded as the kind of tools the "big boys" use. As I understand it Intel used a few of them linked together to simulate the Pentium(s). They had their new architecture booting windows before a single wafer was baked. Pretty cool, huh? Regards.

To: Joe C. who wrote (5345)	7/15/1998 2:38:00 PM
From: Dave Evans	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

I was a little curious about the Quickturn system 3dfx just purchased. Over on the fool boards, someone mentioned partnering with a geometry setup developer. Now that 3dfx seems to like doing everything in house (after Rush, who can blame them), I would imagine that they are using this system on the rampage design, but would it function just as well to test a geometry setup design? Any thoughts on this possibility or the chances that 3dfx bought it for precisely that purpose? Dave