1.
Austin, Texas
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Austin is the capital of the U. S. state of Texas and the seat of Travis County. It is the 11th-most populous city in the U. S. and it is the fastest growing large city in the United States and the second most populous capital city after Phoenix, Arizona. As of the U. S. Census Bureaus July 1,2015 estimate and it is the cultural and economic center of the Austin–Round Rock metropolitan area, which had an estimated population of 2,056,405 as of July 1,2016. In the 1830s, pioneers began to settle the area in central Austin along the Colorado River, in 1839, the site was officially chosen to replace Houston as the new capital of the Republic of Texas and was incorporated under the name Waterloo. Shortly thereafter, the name was changed to Austin in honor of Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas and the republics first secretary of state. The city subsequently grew throughout the 19th century and became a center for government and education with the construction of the Texas State Capitol and the University of Texas at Austin. After a lull in growth from the Great Depression, Austin resumed its development into a city and, by the 1980s, it emerged as a center for technology. A number of Fortune 500 companies have headquarters or regional offices in Austin, including Amazon. com, cisco, eBay, Google, IBM, Intel, Oracle Corporation, Texas Instruments, 3M, and Whole Foods Market. Dells worldwide headquarters is located in nearby Round Rock, a suburb of Austin, residents of Austin are known as Austinites. They include a mix of government employees, college students, musicians, high-tech workers, blue-collar workers. The city also adopted Silicon Hills as a nickname in the 1990s due to an influx of technology. In the late 1800s, Austin was known as the City of the Violet Crown because of the glow of light across the hills just after sunset. Even today, many Austin businesses use the term Violet Crown in their name, Austin is known as a clean-air city for its stringent no-smoking ordinances that apply to all public places and buildings, including restaurants and bars. The FBI ranked Austin as the second-safest major city in the U. S. for the year 2012, U. S. News & World Report named Austin the best place to live in the U. S. in 2017. Austin, Travis County and Williamson County have been the site of habitation since at least 9200 BC. When settlers arrived from Europe, the Tonkawa tribe inhabited the area, the Comanches and Lipan Apaches were also known to travel through the area. Spanish colonists, including the Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre expedition, traveled through the area for centuries, in 1730, three missions from East Texas were combined and reestablished as one mission on the south side of the Colorado River, in what is now Zilker Park, in Austin. The mission was in area for only about seven months
2.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
3.
Salt Lake City
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Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and the most populous municipality of the U. S. state of Utah. With an estimated population of 190,884 in 2014, the city lies at the core of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, Salt Lake City is further situated within a larger metropolis known as the Salt Lake City-Ogden-Provo Combined Statistical Area. This region is a corridor of contiguous urban and suburban development stretched along an approximately 120-mile segment of the Wasatch Front and it is one of only two major urban areas in the Great Basin. The city was founded in 1847 by Brigham Young, Isaac Morley, George Washington Bradley and numerous other Mormon followers, who extensively irrigated and cultivated the arid valley. Due to its proximity to the Great Salt Lake, the city was originally named Great Salt Lake City—the word great was dropped from the name in 1868 by the 17th Utah Territorial Legislature. Today, however, less than half the population of Salt Lake City proper are members of the LDS Church. It was traversed by the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway, in 1913, Salt Lake City has since developed a strong outdoor recreation tourist industry based primarily on skiing, and hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics. It is the banking center of the United States. Before Mormon settlement, the Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute had dwelt in the Salt Lake Valley for thousands of years. The land was treated by the United States as public domain, the first U. S. explorer in the Salt Lake area is believed to be Jim Bridger in 1825, although others had been in Utah earlier, some as far north as the nearby Utah Valley. Frémont surveyed the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Lake Valley in 1843 and 1845, the Donner Party, a group of ill-fated pioneers, had traveled through the Great Salt Lake Valley in August 1846. The first permanent settlements in the date to the arrival of the Latter-day Saints on July 24,1847. Upon arrival at the Salt Lake Valley, president of the church Brigham Young is recorded as stating, This is the right place, Brigham Young claimed to have seen the area in a vision prior to the wagon trains arrival. They found the broad valley empty of any human settlement, four days after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young designated the building site for the Salt Lake Temple, which would eventually become a famous Mormon and Salt Lake City landmark. The Salt Lake Temple, constructed on the block that would later be called Temple Square, construction started in 1853, and the temple was dedicated on 6 April 1893. The temple has become an icon for the city and serves as its centerpiece, in fact, the southeast corner of Temple Square is the initial point of reference for the Salt Lake Meridian, and for all addresses in the Salt Lake Valley. The Mormon pioneers organized a new state called Deseret and petitioned for its recognition in 1849, the United States Congress rebuffed the settlers in 1850 and established the Utah Territory, vastly reducing its size, and designated Fillmore as its capital city. Great Salt Lake City replaced Fillmore as the capital in 1858
4.
Silicon Valley
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Silicon Valley is a nickname for the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area, in the northern part of the U. S. state of California. The valley in its name refers to the Santa Clara Valley in Santa Clara County, which includes the city of San Jose and surrounding cities and towns, where the region has been traditionally centered. The region has expanded to include the half of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Mateo County. It was in the Valley that the integrated circuit, the microprocessor. As of 2013, the region employed about a quarter of an information technology workers. The term is now used as a synecdoche for the American high-technology economic sector. The first published use of Silicon Valley is credited to Don Hoefler, hostler used the phrase as the title of a series of articles in the weekly trade newspaper Electronic News. The series, entitled Silicon Valley in the USA, began in the papers January 11,1971, the term gained widespread use in the early 1980s, at the time of the introduction of the IBM PC and numerous related hardware and software products to the consumer market. The silicon part of the name refers to the concentration of companies involved in the making of semiconductors. These firms slowly replaced the orchards and the fruits which gave the area its initial nickname — the Valley of Hearts Delight, Stanford University leadership was especially important in the valleys early development. Together these elements formed the basis of its growth and success, the ship had been outfitted with a wireless telegraph transmitter by a local newspaper, so that they could prepare a celebration on the return of the American sailors. Local historian Clyde Arbuckle states in Clyde Arbuckles History of San Jose that California first heard the click of a key on September 11,1853. It marked completion of an enterprise begun by a couple of San Francisco Merchants Exchange members named George Sweeney and it was known as the Inner Station, the second, as the Outer Station. Both used their primitive mode of communication until Messrs, Sweeney and Baugh connected the Outer Station directly with the Merchantss Exchange by electric telegraph Wire. According to Arbuckle Sweeney and Baughs line was strictly an intra-city, San Francisco-based service, allen and C. Burnham led the way to build a line from San Francisco to Marysville via San Jose, Stockton, and Sacramento. Delays to construction occurred until September 1853, but, …San Jose became the first station on the line when the wire arrived here on October 15, the line was completed when Gambles northbound crew met a similar crew working southward from Marysville on October 24. The Bay Area had long been a site of United States Navy research. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose
5.
Graphics processing unit
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GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. In a personal computer, a GPU can be present on a video card, the term GPU was popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256 as the worlds first GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit. It was presented as a processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping. Rival ATI Technologies coined the visual processing unit or VPU with the release of the Radeon 9700 in 2002. Arcade system boards have been using specialized graphics chips since the 1970s, in early video game hardware, the RAM for frame buffers was expensive, so video chips composited data together as the display was being scanned out on the monitor. Fujitsus MB14241 video shifter was used to accelerate the drawing of sprite graphics for various 1970s arcade games from Taito and Midway, such as Gun Fight, Sea Wolf, the Namco Galaxian arcade system in 1979 used specialized graphics hardware supporting RGB color, multi-colored sprites and tilemap backgrounds. The Galaxian hardware was used during the golden age of arcade video games, by game companies such as Namco, Centuri, Gremlin, Irem, Konami, Midway, Nichibutsu, Sega. In the home market, the Atari 2600 in 1977 used a video shifter called the Television Interface Adaptor,6502 machine code subroutines could be triggered on scan lines by setting a bit on a display list instruction. ANTIC also supported smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling independent of the CPU and it became one of the best known of what were known as graphics processing units in the 1980s. The Williams Electronics arcade games Robotron,2084, Joust, Sinistar, in 1985, the Commodore Amiga featured a custom graphics chip, with a blitter unit accelerating bitmap manipulation, line draw, and area fill functions. Also included is a coprocessor with its own instruction set, capable of manipulating graphics hardware registers in sync with the video beam. In 1986, Texas Instruments released the TMS34010, the first microprocessor with on-chip graphics capabilities and it could run general-purpose code, but it had a very graphics-oriented instruction set. In 1990-1992, this chip would become the basis of the Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture Windows accelerator cards, in 1987, the IBM8514 graphics system was released as one of the first video cards for IBM PC compatibles to implement fixed-function 2D primitives in electronic hardware. Fujitsu later competed with the FM Towns computer, released in 1989 with support for a full 16,777,216 color palette, in 1988, the first dedicated polygonal 3D graphics boards were introduced in arcades with the Namco System 21 and Taito Air System. In 1991, S3 Graphics introduced the S3 86C911, which its designers named after the Porsche 911 as an implication of the performance increase it promised. The 86C911 spawned a host of imitators, by 1995, all major PC graphics chip makers had added 2D acceleration support to their chips. By this time, fixed-function Windows accelerators had surpassed expensive general-purpose graphics coprocessors in Windows performance, throughout the 1990s, 2D GUI acceleration continued to evolve. As manufacturing capabilities improved, so did the level of integration of graphics chips, arcade systems such as the Sega Model 2 and Namco Magic Edge Hornet Simulator in 1993 were capable of hardware T&L years before appearing in consumer graphics cards
6.
Trident Microsystems
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Trident Microsystems was a fabless semiconductor company that in the 1990s was a well-known supplier of graphics chipsets used in video cards and on motherboards for desktop PCs and laptops. It filed for protection in January 2012 and the delisting of its common stock from the NASDAQ stock market was announced shortly thereafter. Established in 1987, Trident gained a reputation for selling inexpensive, many OEMs built add-in-boards using Trident VGA chipsets. The rapid introduction of 3D graphics caught many graphics suppliers off guard and it was not until the late 1990s that Trident finally released a competitive chip, the TGUI-9880. By this time, Tridents reach had once again retreated to the low-end OEM market, where it was crowded by ATI, S3, and SiS. Meanwhile, in the market, Trident was an early pioneer of embedded DRAM. In this market it competed with NeoMagic, although Trident enjoyed some success with its 3DImage and Blade3D product-lines, the entry of Intel into PC graphics signalled the end of the bottom-end, graphics-chip market. Trident partnered with motherboard chipset suppliers several times to integrate its graphics technology into a motherboard chipset, faced with a contracting market and rising research and development costs, Trident announced a substantial restructuring of the company in June 2003. In late 2003, XGI completed the acquisition of Tridents former graphics division and its revenues increased from $69 million in the fiscal year ended June 30,2005, to $270 million in fiscal year 2007, when it had net income of $30 million. This success allowed the company to increase its cash reserves to more than $200 million by 2008, under new management, in May 2009 Trident completed the acquisition of selected assets of the frame rate converter, demodulator and audio product lines from Micronas. In October 2009 Trident announced a deal with NXP Semiconductors to transfer NXPs TV and STB businesses to Trident, the deal was closed in February 2010. The Micronas and NXP acquisitions involved a substantial and diverse product portfolio and a number of employees in widely dispersed operations in the U. S. Europe, Asia. According to unaudited results for 2011, revenues decreased by 46. 5% in 2011, on January 4,2012, Trident filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection appointing Entropic Communications as the stalking horse bidder. In February 2012, Entropic announced it would buy Tridents set-top box chip business for $60 million, in June 2012, Cambridge Silicon Radio paid $1M for Tridents audio products. Around the same time Sigma Designs purchased Tridents remaining TV chip business, Trident common shares traded on the NASDAQ stock market from its IPO on December 16,1992 to 2012. The stock split two-for-one on 21 November 2005 and reached a high of $31.07 on 19 April 2006 and it later declined substantially including a large drop on 26 October 2007. The stock dropped below $3 in September 2008 and it would never close above $3 again, in 2011, Trident reached a settlement with its former CEO resulting from a derivative shareholder suit that resulted in payment of $9.4 million to the company. The following lists are not complete, xP8 - DirectX9 chip, marketed for under $100US
7.
Western Digital
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Western Digital Corporation is an American computer data storage company and one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers in the world, along with Seagate Technology. Western Digital Corporation has a history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit maker. Western Digital was founded on April 23,1970, by Alvin B, phillips, a Motorola employee, as General Digital, initially a manufacturer of MOS test equipment. It rapidly became a speciality semiconductor maker, with capital provided by several individual investors. Around July 1971, it adopted its current name and soon introduced its first product, the oil crisis of the mid-1970s and the bankruptcy of its biggest calculator customer, Bowmar Instrument, changed its fortunes, however, and in 1976 Western Digital declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. After this, Emerson withdrew their support of the company, WDC introduced several landmark products during this time, including the MCP-1600 multi-chip, microcoded CPU. The MCP-1600 was used to implement DECs LSI-11 system and their own Pascal MicroEngine microcomputer which ran the UCSD p-System Version III, the processor was also used in several single-chip floppy disk drive controller chips, notably the FD1771. However, the WD integrated circuit that arguably drove Westerns forward integration was the 1771 chip, despite a price far higher than average CMOS chips of the time, it was very successful and extremely profitable. That controller, the WD1003, became the basis of the ATA interface, throughout most of the 1980s, the family of controllers based on the WD1003 provided the bulk of WDCs revenues and profits, and for a time generated enormous corporate growth. Much of the mid-to-late 1980s saw an effort by WDC to use the profits from their ATA storage controllers to become a general-purpose OEM hardware supplier for the PC industry, as a result, WDC purchased a number of hardware companies. These included graphics cards, core logic chipsets, SCSI controller chips for disk and tape devices and they did well, but storage-related chips and disk controllers were their biggest money makers. 1988 also brought what would be the biggest change in WDCs history and that year, WDC bought the hard drive production assets of PC hardware maker Tandon, the first products of that union under WDCs own name were the Centaur series of ATA and XT attachment drives. By 1991, things were starting to slow down, as the PC industry moved from ST-506 and ESDI drives to ATA and SCSI and that year saw the rise of WDCs Caviar drives, brand new designs that used the latest in embedded servo and computerized diagnostic systems. Eventually, the sales of the Caviar drives resulted in WDC starting to sell some of its divisions. Paradise was sold to Philips, and since disappeared and its networking and floppy drive controller divisions went to SMC Networks and its SCSI chip business went to Future Domain, which was later bought out by market leader Adaptec. Around 1995, the lead that the Caviar drives had enjoyed was eclipsed by newer offerings from other companies, especially Quantum Corp. Products and ideas of time did not go far. The Portfolio drive was a flop, as was the SDX hard disk to CD-ROM interface, in an attempt to turn the tide in 1998, WDC recruited the help of IBM
8.
Conventional PCI
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Conventional PCI, often shortened to PCI, is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer. PCI is the initialism for Peripheral Component Interconnect and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard, the PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format that is independent of any particular processors native bus. Devices connected to the PCI bus appear to a bus master to be connected directly to its own bus and are assigned addresses in the address space. It is a bus, synchronous to a single bus clock. Attached devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard itself or a card that fits into a slot. The PCI Local Bus was first implemented in IBM PC compatibles and it has subsequently been adopted for other computer types. Typical PCI cards used in PCs include, network cards, sound cards, modems, extra ports such as USB or serial, TV tuner cards, PCI video cards replaced ISA and VESA cards until growing bandwidth requirements outgrew the capabilities of PCI. The preferred interface for video cards then became AGP, itself a superset of conventional PCI and these have one locating notch in the card. Version 2.0 of the PCI standard introduced 3.3 V slots, universal cards, which can operate on either voltage, have two notches. Version 2.1 of the PCI standard introduced optional 66 MHz operation, a server-oriented variant of conventional PCI, called PCI-X operated at frequencies up to 133 MHz for PCI-X1.0 and up to 533 MHz for PCI-X2.0. An internal connector for laptop cards, called Mini PCI, was introduced in version 2.2 of the PCI specification, the PCI bus was also adopted for an external laptop connector standard – the CardBus. The first PCI specification was developed by Intel, but subsequent development of the standard became the responsibility of the PCI Special Interest Group, Conventional PCIs heyday in the desktop computer market was approximately 1995–2005. PCI and PCI-X have become obsolete for most purposes, however, they are common on modern desktops for the purposes of backwards compatibility. Many kinds of devices available on PCI expansion cards are now commonly integrated onto motherboards or available in USB. Work on PCI began at Intels Architecture Development Lab c. 1990, a team of Intel engineers defined the architecture and developed a proof of concept chipset and platform partnering with teams in the companys desktop PC systems and core logic product organizations. PCI was immediately put to use in servers, replacing MCA, in mainstream PCs, PCI was slower to replace VESA Local Bus, and did not gain significant market penetration until late 1994 in second-generation Pentium PCs. By 1996, VLB was all but extinct, and manufacturers had adopted PCI even for 486 computers, EISA continued to be used alongside PCI through 2000. Apple Computer adopted PCI for professional Power Macintosh computers in mid-1995, the 64-bit version of plain PCI remained rare in practice though, although it was used for example by all G3 and G4 Power Macintosh computers
9.
RDRAM
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Rambus DRAM, and its successors Concurrent Rambus DRAM and Direct Rambus DRAM, are types of synchronous dynamic RAM developed by Rambus from the late-1980s through to the early-2000s. The third-generation of Rambus DRAM, DRDRAM was replaced by XDR DRAM, Rambus DRAM was developed for high-bandwidth applications, and was positioned by Rambus as replacement for various types of contemporary memories, such as SDRAM. DRDRAM was initially expected to become the standard in PC memory, further, DRDRAM was expected to become a standard for graphics memory. However, RDRAM got embroiled in a war with an alternative technology—DDR SDRAM—and quickly lost out on grounds of price. By around 2003, DRDRAM was no longer supported by any personal computer, the first PC motherboards with support for RDRAM debuted in late 1999, after two major delays. RDRAM was controversial during its use by Intel for having high licensing fees, high cost, being a proprietary standard. RDRAM and DDR SDRAM were involved in a standards war, PC-800 RDRAM operated at 400 MHz and delivered 1600 MB/s of bandwidth over a 16-bit bus. It was packaged as a 184-pin RIMM form factor, similar to a DIMM, data is transferred on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal, a technique known as DDR. To emphasize the advantages of the DDR technique, this type of RAM was marketed at speeds twice the clock rate. This was significantly faster than the standard, PC-133 SDRAM. Moreover, if a mainboard has a dual- or quad-channel memory subsystem, 16-bit modules provide one channel of memory, while 32-bit modules provide two channels. Therefore, a dual channel mainboard accepting 16-bit modules must have RIMMs added or removed in pairs, a dual channel mainboard accepting 32-bit modules can have single RIMMs added or removed as well. Note that some of the later 32 bit modules had 232 pins as compared to the older 184 pin 16 bit modules, the design of many common Rambus memory controllers dictated that memory modules be installed in sets of two. CRIMMs appear physically similar to regular RIMMs, except they lack integrated circuits, compared to other contemporary standards, Rambus showed increase in latency, heat output, manufacturing complexity, and cost. Note that the most common RDRAM densities are 128 Mbit and 256 Mbit, PC-800 RDRAM operated with a latency of 45 ns, more than that of other SDRAM varieties of the time. RDRAM memory chips also put out significantly more heat than SDRAM chips, RDRAM includes additional circuitry on each chip, increasing manufacturing complexity compared to SDRAM. RDRAM was also up to four times the price of PC-133 SDRAM due to a combination of manufacturing costs. PC-2100 DDR SDRAM, introduced in 2000, operated with a rate of 133 MHz
10.
Industry Standard Architecture
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Industry Standard Architecture is a retronym term for the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, originally referred to as the PC/AT-bus it was also termed I/O Channel by IBM. The 16-bit ISA bus was used with 32-bit processors for several years. An attempt to extend it to 32 bits, called Extended Industry Standard Architecture, was not very successful, later buses such as VESA Local Bus and PCI were used instead, often along with ISA slots on the same mainboard. Derivatives of the AT bus structure were and still are used in ATA/IDE, the PCMCIA standard, Compact Flash, the PC/104 bus, compaq created the term Industry Standard Architecture to replace PC compatible. The ISA bus was developed by a led by Mark Dean at IBM as part of the IBM PC project in 1981. It originated as an 8-bit system, the newer 16-bit standard, the IBM AT bus, was introduced in 1984. Therefore, the ISA bus was synchronous with the CPU clock, designed to connect peripheral cards to the motherboard, ISA allows for bus mastering although only the first 16 MB of main memory are available for direct access. The 8-bit bus ran at 4.77 MHz, while the 16-bit bus operated at 6 or 8 MHz IBM RT/PC also used the 16-bit bus. It was also available on some non-IBM compatible machines such as Motorola 68k-based Apollo and Amiga 3000 workstations, the short-lived AT&T Hobbit and later PowerPC based BeBox. MCA had many features that would appear in PCI, the successor of ISA. The system was far more advanced than the AT bus, and computer manufacturers responded with the Extended Industry Standard Architecture and later, in fact, VLB used some electronic parts originally intended for MCA because component manufacturers already were equipped to manufacture them. Both EISA and VLB were backwards-compatible expansions of the AT bus, users of ISA-based machines had to know special information about the hardware they were adding to the system. While a handful of devices were essentially plug-n-play, this was rare, users frequently had to configure several parameters when adding a new device, such as the IRQ line, I/O address, or DMA channel. MCA had done away with this complication, and PCI actually incorporated many of the ideas first explored with MCA, in reality, ISA PnP can be troublesome, and did not become well-supported until the architecture was in its final days. PCI slots were the first physically incompatible expansion ports to directly squeeze ISA off the motherboard, at first, motherboards were largely ISA, including a few PCI slots. By the mid-1990s, the two types were roughly balanced, and ISA slots soon were in the minority of consumer systems. Which was why the software compatible LPC bus was created, in late 2008, even floppy disk drives and serial ports were disappearing, and the extinction of vestigial ISA from chipsets was on the horizon
11.
Video card
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A video card is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display. Frequently, these are advertised as discrete or dedicated graphics cards, Standards such as MDA, CGA, HGC, Tandy, PGC, EGA, VGA, MCGA,8514 or XGA were introduced from 1982 to 1990 and supported by a variety of hardware manufacturers. The majority of video cards are built with either AMD-sourced or Nvidia-sourced graphics chips. Until 2000, 3dfx Interactive was also an important, and often groundbreaking, most video cards offer various functions such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors. Video cards also have sound capabilities to output sound – along with the video for connected TVs or monitors with integrated speakers. Graphics cards werent very useful for computers, since they didnt have the capability to run graphic-based games or high-resolution videos as modern computers do now. Within the industry, video cards are sometimes called graphics add-in-boards, abbreviated as AIBs, as an alternative to the use of a video card, video hardware can be integrated into the motherboard or the CPU. Both approaches can be called integrated graphics, motherboard-based implementations are sometimes called on-board video while CPU-based implementations are known as accelerated processing units. The ability to disable the integrated graphics sometimes also allows the use of a motherboard on which the on-board video has failed. Sometimes both the graphics and a dedicated graphics card can be used simultaneously to feed separate displays. The main advantages of integrated graphics include cost, compactness, simplicity, the performance disadvantage of integrated graphics arises because the graphics processor shares system resources with the CPU. A dedicated graphics card has its own random access memory, its own cooling system, upgrading to a dedicated graphics card offloads work from the CPU and system RAM, so not only will graphics processing be faster, but the computers overall performance may also improve. Both of the dominant CPU makers, AMD and Intel, are moving to APUs, as of late 2013, the best APUs provide graphics processing approaching mid-range mobile video cards and are adequate for casual gaming. Users seeking the highest video performance for gaming or other graphics-intensive uses should still choose computers with dedicated graphics cards. Beyond the enthusiast segment is the market for video cards for workstations used in the special effects industry. Nvidia is a player in the professional segment. As the processing power of cards has increased, so has their demand for electrical power. Current high-performance video cards tend to consume a great deal of power, for example, the thermal design power for the GeForce GTX TITAN is 250 Watts
12.
VESA Local Bus
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The VESA Local Bus is a short-lived expansion bus that was mostly used in personal computers. VESA Local Bus worked alongside the ISA bus, acting as a conduit for memory-mapped I/O and DMA, while the ISA bus handled interrupts. In the early 1990s, the I/O bandwidth of the ISA bus was becoming a bottleneck to PC graphics performance. The need for faster graphics was being driven by increasing adoption of graphical user interfaces in PC operating systems, the competing EISA open standard was still unable to offer enough performance improvement over ISA to provide a solution. However, as these manufacturer-specific solutions were not standardized, there were no provisions for providing interoperability between them and this led to the VESA consortium proposing and defining a Local Bus standard in 1992. A VLB slot itself was simply an additional edge connector placed in-line with the traditional ISA or EISA connector, the result was a normal ISA or EISA slot being additionally capable of accepting VLB-compatible cards. Traditional ISA cards remained compatible as they would not have pins past the normal ISA or EISA portion of the slot. The reverse was also true – VLB cards were by necessity quite long in order to reach the VLB connector, and were reminiscent of older full-length expansion cards from the earlier IBM XT era. Ironically, the VLB portion of a slot looked similar to an IBM MCA slot, as indeed it was the same physical 116-pin connector used by MCA cards, rotated by 180 degrees. The IBM MCA standard had not been as popular as IBM expected and there was a surplus of the connector, making it inexpensive. The VESA Local Bus was designed as a solution to the problem of the ISA buss limited bandwidth. As VLB fundamentally tied a card directly to the 486 processor bus with minimal intermediary logic, timing and arbitration duties were strongly dependent on the cards and CPU. When the Pentium processor arrived there were differences in its bus design. Few Pentium motherboards with VLB slots were ever made, and used VLB-to-PCI bridges such as the OPTi 82C822, also moving the bus to non-x86 architectures was nearly impossible. Limited number of slots available Most PCs that used VESA Local Bus had only one or two VLB capable ISA slots from the five or six available, thus, four ISA slots generally were just that, ISA only. This was a result of VESA Local Bus being a branch of the 80486 memory bus. The processor did not have the ability to correctly drive more than two or three devices at a time directly from this bus. Reliability problems The strict electrical limitations on the bus also reduced any safety margin available, glitches between cards were common, as the interaction between individual cards, combinations of cards, motherboard implementation, and even the processor itself was difficult to predict
