Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 00:41:12 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: dot@dotat.at (Tony Finch) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: USB drivers Message-ID: <199902030041.RAA10247@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <E10701v-0004uS-00@fanf.noc.demon.net> from "Tony Finch" at Jan 31, 99 04:47:27 pm
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> >And I guess the ability to pull an Amiga and use a section of main > >memory as video memory, with a memory bus connector, instead of > >on-board video hardware. > > I'm not convinced that this is feasible nowadays. For years now > graphics cards have had fairly special memory architectures (VRAM > etc.) so that they can stream data from the RAM to the DAC at a couple > of hundred megapixels per second without killing the bandwidth > available to the controller (let alone the CPU). I was never an Amiga > geek but I guess "chip RAM" or whatever it was called was supposed to > address this problem. "Chip RAM" is functionally equivalent to the area in which a bounce buffer can reside on an ISA machine. It's the area of memory that is addressable from the I/O bus. Actually, search Altavista for "ROCKY-518HV"; it's a single board computer (US$175 FOB Taiwan) that uses up to 4M of main memory for it's VGA display. > It would also be cool to be able to plug your disks and your graphics > controller into the same bus so that you can tell your rendering > engine to load its graphics from over there and then spend some time > doing something more useful than shuffling megabytes... > > Maybe in a year or two :-) http://www.salutation.org SLP and LDAP, anyone? 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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