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

To: Waldeen who wrote (8251)	10/15/1998 4:56:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 16960

My personal opinion was (at the time of LTCM bail out), that the way FED convinced the banks to put up the money, was to assure them that there would be another rate cut would matterialize sooner than anyone expected. Those banks could then use this info to make some money off. I still believe that. The problem is that in the futures market, unlike the stock market, there is a loser for every winner. Hence any money made on the part of those in the know, has been lost by others. This wealth destruction goes a long way towards ensuring a bear market. ST

To: Waldeen who wrote (8251)	10/17/1998 5:34:00 PM
From: Waldeen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

News "Microprocessor Forum: Accelerators strain 3-D graphics development" eet.com full text follows, "By Rick Boyd-Merritt EE Times (10/15/98, 5:56 p.m. EDT) SAN JOSE, Calif. — The business of designing 3-D computer graphics chips remains a highly innovative, risky blood sport, according to presenters at the Microprocessor Forum. 3Dlabs Inc. detailed an architecture aimed at carving out a new price/performance point in workstation graphics. ATI Technologies Inc. detailed its latest mainstream PC 3-D accelerator, and Mitsubishi Electric described what it called the first single-chip device for volume rendering. All three companies said the task of designing good 3-D parts is becoming increasingly complex, and an analyst said the industry could see a shakeout soon. "There are about 45 companies active in this area, but we probably only need 20 of these to have a healthy industry," said Peter Glaskowsky, senior analyst with Microprocessor Report, which sponsored the forum. Glaskowsky called for an end to the madness of investing in new graphics startups. Though up to 30 companies could end their work in this field within a year or two, Glaskowsky said he expects other new companies to try to break into the field in 1999. The task of designing 3-D accelerators grows increasingly complex each year, stretching out design cycles, he said. As a result, "some graphics companies won't have a new mainstream 3-D chip in 1998." Both 3Dlabs and ATI have been so late in delivering their respective chips this year , Glaskowsky said they have jeopardized design wins for the key fall sales cycle. Despite the somber mood, 3Dlabs rolled out Gamma 3, a new high-end geometry processor that offers dual 4x AGP ports. A bridging capability allows up to seven Gamma 3 chips to be combined in a single design. Neil Trevett, vice president of workstation products for 3Dlabs, described a two-board design that uses the AGP Pro bus to combine seven Gamma chips with eight Glint R4 rasterization chips and a 256 Mbyte frame buffer. This design delivers 44 million polygons/second at a cost of less than $5,000, Trevett said. The design would outperform workstation graphics from Silicon Graphics Inc., Intergraph Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. that sport higher costs, he said. Each Gamma 3 chip builds in three parallel geometry processing pipelines with a total latency of 150 clock cycles per pipe line, Trevett said. Each Glint R4 can render up to 6 million polygons/second using a 64 Mbyte frame buffer. Multiple R4's share a common larger frame buffer by dedicating striped zones for their work. Gangs of individual chips were deliberately used to get the most mileage from the silicon, Trevett said. "We can't hold back the complexity of 3D, so we just have to get smarter," he said. "We have to reduce the amount of engineering and get the most leverage we can out of every chip we design." For its part, ATI's designers tried to reuse as many blocks as possible in their fourth-generation accelerator, the Rage 128. The chip relies on the Katmai New Instructions of the Pentium II or the 3Dnow instructions of the AMD K-6 2 to handle geometry transform and lighting work, according to Bob Feldstein, director of engineering for ATI Research Inc. (Marlborough, Mass.). Rage-128 is aimed at the PC mainstream, where ATI is now the dominant supplier since unseating S3 Corp. The 8-million transistor design will sell for about $35 and offer performance of about 100 million multi-textured pixels/second. On the CDRS benchmark used for OpenGL applications, the chip rates about 60, as compared to the high-end Gamma 3 workstation cards, which nab a score of about 1,300. Finally, Mitsubishi Electronic Research Lab (Cambridge, Mass.) described its VolumePro, an ASIC it described as the market's first single-chip volume rendering engine. The chip, which uses four parallel rendering pipelines operating at 133 MHz, employs a modified ray-casting algorithm to interpolate, classify, light and shade 3-D spaces. The chip has 2 Mbytes of SRAM on board, and is designed for use on a PCI card. It relies on a separate 2-D/3-D graphics card to deliver 16 million volume units (voxels) at 30 frames/second. The VolumePro is mainly aimed at medical and scientific applications. But Hanspeter Pfister, lead designer of the VolumePro, said Mitsubishi believes volume rendering will ultimately merge with standard 3-D polygon rendering engines in hybrid graphics systems."