1.
Ticker symbol
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A ticker symbol or stock symbol is an abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock on a particular stock market. A stock symbol may consist of letters, numbers or a combination of both, ticker symbol refers to the symbols that were printed on the ticker tape of a ticker tape machine. Stock symbols are unique identifiers assigned to each security traded on a particular market, for example, AAPL is for Apple Inc. OODH is for Orion DHC, Inc. and HD is for Home Depot, a stock symbol can consist of letters, numbers, or a combination of both, and is a way to uniquely identify that stock. The symbols were kept as short as possible to reduce the number of characters that had to be printed on the ticker tape, the allocation of symbols and formatting convention is specific to each stock exchange. In the US, for example, stock tickers are typically between 1 and 4 letters and represent the name where possible. In Europe, most exchanges use three-letter codes, for example Dutch consumer goods company Unilever traded on the Amsterdam Euronext exchange has the symbol UNA, while in Asia, numbers are often used as stock tickers to avoid issues for international investors when using non-Latin scripts. For example, the bank HSBCs stock traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has the ticker symbol 0005, symbols sometimes change to reflect mergers. Prior to the 1999 merger with Mobil Oil, Exxon used a spelling of the company XON as its ticker symbol. The symbol of the firm after the merger was XOM, symbols are sometimes reused, in the US the single-letter symbols are particularly sought after as vanity symbols. For example, since Mar 2008 Visa Inc. has used the symbol V that had previously used by Vivendi which had delisted. To fully qualify a stock, both the ticker and the exchange or country of listing needs to be known, on many systems both must be specified to uniquely identify the security. This is often done by appending the location or exchange code to the ticker, although stock tickers identify a security, they are exchange dependent, generally limited to stocks and can change. These limitations have led to the development of other codes in financial markets to identify securities for settlement purposes, the most prevalent of these is the International Securities Identifying Number. An ISIN uniquely identifies a security and its structure is defined in ISO6166, Securities for which ISINs are issued include bonds, commercial paper, stocks, and warrants. The ISIN identifies the security, not the exchange on which it trades, for instance, Daimler AG stock trades on twenty-two different stock exchanges worldwide, and is priced in five different currencies, it has the same ISIN on each, though not the same ticker symbol. ISIN cannot specify a particular trade in this case, and another identifier, following the introduction of the Sequence trading platform in 1996, EPICs were renamed Tradable Instrument Display Mnemonics, but they are still widely referred to as EPICs. Stocks can also be identified using their SEDOL number or their ISIN, in the United States, modern letter-only ticker symbols were developed by Standard & Poors to bring a national standard to investing
2.
NASDAQ
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The Nasdaq Stock Market is an American stock exchange. It is the second-largest exchange in the world by market capitalization, the exchange platform is owned by Nasdaq, Inc. which also owns the Nasdaq Nordic and Nasdaq Baltic stock market network and several other US stock and options exchanges. When it was founded, NASDAQ stood for the acronym of National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, NASDAQ was founded in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers, which divested itself of NASDAQ in a series of sales in 2000 and 2001. The Nasdaq Stock Market is owned and operated by Nasdaq, Inc. the stocks of which were listed on its own stock exchange marketing July 2,2002, when the Nasdaq Stock Market began trading on February 8,1971, it was the worlds first electronic stock market. At first, it was merely a system and did not provide a way to perform electronic trades. The Nasdaq Stock Market helped lower the spread but was unpopular among brokerages which made much of their money on the spread. As late as 1987, the NASDAQ exchange was still referred to as OTC in media. Over the years, the Nasdaq Stock Market became more of a market by adding trade and volume reporting. The Nasdaq Stock Market attracted new companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Oracle and Dell. Its main index is the NASDAQ Composite, which has published since its inception. In 1992, the Nasdaq Stock Market joined with the London Stock Exchange to form the first intercontinental linkage of securities markets, the National Association of Securities Dealers spun off the Nasdaq Stock Market in 2000 to form a publicly traded company. In 2006, the status of the Nasdaq Stock Market was changed from a market to a licensed national securities exchange. In 2007, Nasdaq merged with OMX, an exchange operator in the Nordic countries, expanded its global footprint. NASDAQ OMX could be looking to acquire the American exchanges cash equities business, at the time, NYSE Euronext’s market value was $9.75 billion. Nasdaq was valued at $5.78 billion, while ICE was valued at $9.45 billion. Late in the month, Nasdaq was reported to be considering asking either ICE or the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to join in what would probably have to be, if it proceeded, an $11–12 billion counterbid. The European Association of Securities Dealers Automatic Quotation System was founded as a European equivalent to the Nasdaq Stock Market and it was purchased by NASDAQ in 2001 and became NASDAQ Europe. Operations were shut down, however, as a result of the burst of the dot-com bubble, in 2007, NASDAQ Europe was revived as Equiduct, and is currently operating under Börse Berlin
3.
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
4.
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
5.
Net income
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In business, net income is an entitys income minus cost of goods sold, expenses and taxes for an accounting period. In the context of the presentation of financial statements, the IFRS Foundation defines net income as synonymous with profit, net income is a distinct accounting concept from profit but the same as net profit. Net income can also be calculated by adding a companys operating income to non-operating income, net income can be distributed among holders of common stock as a dividend or held by the firm as an addition to retained earnings. As profit and earnings are used synonymously for income, net earnings, often, the term income is substituted for net income, yet this is not preferred due to the possible ambiguity. Net income is called the bottom line because it is typically found on the last line of a companys income statement. The items deducted will typically include tax expense, financing expense, likewise, preferred stock dividends will be subtracted too, though they are not an expense. For a merchandising company, subtracted costs may be the cost of goods sold, sales discounts, for a product company advertising, manufacturing, and design and development costs are included
6.
Digital signal processor
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A digital signal processor is a specialized microprocessor, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. The goal of DSPs is usually to measure, filter or compress continuous real-world analog signals, DSPs often use special memory architectures that are able to fetch multiple data or instructions at the same time. Digital signal processing algorithms typically require a number of mathematical operations to be performed quickly and repeatedly on a series of data samples. Signals are constantly converted from analog to digital, manipulated digitally, many DSP applications have constraints on latency, that is, for the system to work, the DSP operation must be completed within some fixed time, and deferred processing is not viable. A specialized digital signal processor, however, will tend to provide a lower-cost solution, with performance, lower latency. For example, the SES-12 and SES-14 satellites from operator SES, the architecture of a digital signal processor is optimized specifically for digital signal processing. Most also support some of the features as a processor or microcontroller. Some useful features for optimizing DSP algorithms are outlined below, sometimes various sticky bits operation modes are available. DSPs can sometimes rely on supporting code to know about cache hierarchies and this is a tradeoff that allows for better performance. In addition, extensive use of DMA is employed, DSPs frequently use multi-tasking operating systems, but have no support for virtual memory or memory protection. Operating systems that use virtual memory require more time for context switching among processes, the AMD2901 bit-slice chip with its family of components was a very popular choice. There were reference designs from AMD, but very often the specifics of a design were application specific. These bit slice architectures would sometimes include a peripheral multiplier chip, examples of these multipliers were a series from TRW including the TDC1008 and TDC1010, some of which included an accumulator, providing the requisite multiply–accumulate function. In 1976, Richard Wiggins proposed the Speak & Spell concept to Paul Breedlove, Larry Brantingham, two years later in 1978 they produced the first Speak & Spell, with the technological centerpiece being the TMS5100, the industrys first digital signal processor. It also set other milestones, being the first chip to use Linear predictive coding to perform speech synthesis, in 1978, Intel released the 2920 as an analog signal processor. It had an on-chip ADC/DAC with a signal processor. In 1979, AMI released the S2811 and it was designed as a microprocessor peripheral, and it had to be initialized by the host. The S2811 was likewise not successful in the market, in 1980 the first stand-alone, complete DSPs – the NEC µPD7720 and AT&T DSP1 – were presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference 80
7.
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
8.
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
9.
Kamran Elahian
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Kamran Elahian is an Iranian-American Entrepreneur who is the chairman and co-founder of Global Catalyst Partners, an international, multistage, technology-oriented venture capital firm. GCP has invested in technology companies in the U. S. China, Japan. Kamran serves on the boards of Actelis Networks, Beceem Communications, iKoa, Kamran was born in Tehran in 1954. Kamran immigrated to the United States before the Iranian Revolution, Kamran received a BS in Computer Science, a BS in Mathematics and a Masters of Engineering degree in Computer Graphics from the University of Utah. A veteran entrepreneur with over 29 years of experience in the high-tech industry, Kamran co-founded 10 companies, CAE Systems acquired by Tektronix for $75M, Cirrus Logic IPO at $150M valuation/achieved market cap of over $3. He is also chairman and co-founder of Global Catalyst Foundation, Global Catalyst Foundation is a private foundation established by the principals of Global Catalyst Partners. Its mission is to improve lives through the effective application of information technologies. In 2013, Kamran was a mentor for Unreasonable at Sea, founded by Unreasonable Group, Semester at Sea, and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. In December 2006, The Dr. Kamran Elahian Website Global Catalyst Partners Global Catalyst Foundation
10.
Wolfson Microelectronics
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Wolfson Microelectronics plc was a multinational microelectronics and fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. It specialised in processing and mixed-signal chips for the consumer electronics market and had engineering and sales offices throughout Asia-Pacific, Europe. In 2014 it was acquired by Cirrus Logic for £291 million, started in 1984 by David Milne and Jim Reid, Wolfson grew under their stewardship to float on the London Stock Exchange in 2003 and be listed in the FTSE250. In February,2007, when Milne chose to step down, he was replaced in his CEO role by Dave Shrigley and his departure was one of a number of executive changes in late 2006, as Financial Director George Elliott also stood down. In 2006, Milne was declared Entrepreneur of the Year by the CBI, in November 2006 David Shrigley became the CEO of Wolfson, his first appointment at this level, he had previously worked for Intel in the Asia-Pacific region, and held directorships elsewhere. In September 2008, Mike Hickey joined Wolfson as Chief Executive Officer Designate, mr Hickey joined Wolfson from Motorola Inc, where he had held various senior positions in Motorola’s mobile device business. In July 2009, Andy Brannan joined Wolfson as Chief Commercial Officer, mr Brannan previously held the position of VP of Nokias SOSCO business, and prior to that spent eight years as Executive VP of Sales & Customer Operations at Symbian Ltd. Cirrus Logic acquired the Wolfson for 235p per share in April 2014, valuing the company at £291 million. s iPod series, in April 2010, Wolfson signed a licence agreement with Tensilica to create a low power, high definition sound platform. Wolfson Microelectronics also produced the Audio Cards for Raspberry PI Model B Rev 2 named Wolfson Audio Card, after Wolfson Microelectronics was purchased by Cirrus Logic the Audio Card for Raspberry PI Model B+ was renamed Cirrus Logic Audio Card. In a joint mission in 2006 with the IEEE and Royal Society of Edinburgh, Wolfson provided funding for an award and this award recognizes work with exceptional impact on the development of electronics and electrical engineering or related fields. Recipients receive $20,000 in addition to a medal, a bronze replica and a certificate
11.
Class-T amplifier
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Class T was a registered trademark for a switching audio amplifier, used for Tripaths amplifier technologies. Similar designs have now been adopted by different manufacturers. Among the publicly disclosed differences is real time control of the switching frequency depending on the input signal, one of the amplifiers, the TA2020, was named one of the twenty-five chips that shook the world by the IEEE Spectrum magazine. The control signals in Class T amplifiers may be computed using digital signal processing or fully analog techniques, currently available implementations use a loop similar to a higher order Delta-Sigma modulator, with an internal digital clock to control the sample comparator. Financial difficulties caused Tripath to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 8 February 2007, Tripaths stock and intellectual property were purchased later that year by Cirrus Logic. US Patent for Class T amplifier
12.
Microsoft Windows
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Microsoft Windows is a metafamily of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. It consists of families of operating systems, each of which cater to a certain sector of the computing industry with the OS typically associated with IBM PC compatible architecture. Active Windows families include Windows NT, Windows Embedded and Windows Phone, defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows 10 Mobile is an active product, unrelated to the defunct family Windows Mobile. Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20,1985, Microsoft Windows came to dominate the worlds personal computer market with over 90% market share, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984. Apple came to see Windows as an encroachment on their innovation in GUI development as implemented on products such as the Lisa. On PCs, Windows is still the most popular operating system, however, in 2014, Microsoft admitted losing the majority of the overall operating system market to Android, because of the massive growth in sales of Android smartphones. In 2014, the number of Windows devices sold was less than 25% that of Android devices sold and this comparison however may not be fully relevant, as the two operating systems traditionally target different platforms. As of September 2016, the most recent version of Windows for PCs, tablets, smartphones, the most recent versions for server computers is Windows Server 2016. A specialized version of Windows runs on the Xbox One game console, Microsoft, the developer of Windows, has registered several trademarks each of which denote a family of Windows operating systems that target a specific sector of the computing industry. It now consists of three operating system subfamilies that are released almost at the time and share the same kernel. Windows, The operating system for personal computers, tablets. The latest version is Windows 10, the main competitor of this family is macOS by Apple Inc. for personal computers and Android for mobile devices. Windows Server, The operating system for server computers, the latest version is Windows Server 2016. Unlike its clients sibling, it has adopted a strong naming scheme, the main competitor of this family is Linux. Windows PE, A lightweight version of its Windows sibling meant to operate as an operating system, used for installing Windows on bare-metal computers. The latest version is Windows PE10.0.10586.0, Windows Embedded, Initially, Microsoft developed Windows CE as a general-purpose operating system for every device that was too resource-limited to be called a full-fledged computer. The following Windows families are no longer being developed, Windows 9x, Microsoft now caters to the consumers market with Windows NT. Windows Mobile, The predecessor to Windows Phone, it was a mobile operating system
13.
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
14.
Graphics Device Interface
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GDI is responsible for tasks such as drawing lines and curves, rendering fonts and handling palettes. It is not directly responsible for drawing windows, menus, etc. that task is reserved for the user subsystem, other systems have components that are similar to GDI, for example macOS Quartz and X Window Systems Xlib/XCB. GDIs most significant advantages over more direct methods of accessing the hardware are perhaps its scaling capabilities, using GDI, it is very easy to draw on multiple devices, such as a screen and a printer, and expect proper reproduction in each case. This capability is at the center of most What You See Is What You Get applications for Microsoft Windows, simple games that do not require fast graphics rendering may use GDI. However, GDI is relatively hard to use for advanced animation, modern games usually use DirectX or OpenGL instead, which let programmers exploit the features of modern hardware. A Device Context is used to define the attributes of text, the actual context is maintained by GDI. A handle to the Device Context is obtained before output is written and then released after elements have been written, GDI uses Bresenhams line drawing algorithm to draw aliased lines. GDI was present in the release of Windows. MSDOS programs had hitherto manipulated the graphics hardware using software interrupts, BYTE in December 1983 discussed Microsofts plans for a system to output graphics to both printers and monitors with the same code in the forthcoming first release of Windows. With the introduction of Windows XP, GDI was complemented by the C++-based GDI+ subsystem, GDI+ uses ARGB values to represent color. GDI+ is included with all versions of Windows from Windows XP, the GDI+ dynamic library can also be shipped with an application and used under older versions of Windows from Windows 98 and Windows NT4.0 onwards. The Microsoft. NET class library provides an interface for GDI+ via the System. Drawing namespace. GDI+ is similar to Apples QuickDraw GX subsystem, and the open-source libart, in Windows Vista, all Windows applications including GDI and GDI+ applications run in the new compositing engine, Desktop Window Manager which is built atop the Windows Display Driver Model. However, due to the nature of desktop composition, operations like window moves can be faster or more responsive because underlying content does not need to be re-rendered by the application, Windows 7 includes GDI hardware acceleration for blitting operations in the Windows Display Driver Model v1.1. Most primitive GDI operations are still not hardware-accelerated, unlike Direct2D, as of November 2009, both AMD and Nvidia have released WDDM v1.1 compatible video drivers. GDI+ continues to rely on software rendering in Windows 7, a GDI printer or Winprinter is a printer designed to accept output from a host computer running the GDI under Windows. The combination of the GDI and the driver is bidirectional, they receive information from the printer such as whether it is ready to print, if it is out of paper or ink, and so on. Non-GDI printers require hardware, firmware, and memory for page rendering, some manufacturers produce essentially the same printer in a version compatible with a printer control language such as PCL or PostScript, and a cheaper GDI-only version
15.
Oak Technologies
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Oak Technology was an American supplier of semiconductor chips for sound cards, graphics cards and optical storage devices such as CD-ROM, CD-RW and DVD. It achieved success with optical storage chips and its price increased substantially around the time of the tech bubble in 2000. After falling on hard times, in 2003 it was acquired by Zoran Corporation, Oak Technology helped develop the ATAPI standard and provided the oakcdrom. sys CD-ROM driver that was ubiquitous on DOS-based systems in the mid-1990s. Oak Technology, Inc was founded in 1987 and was based in Sunnyvale, California, during the late 1980s through the early 1990s, Oak was a supplier of PC graphics chipsets and PCBs. Oak Technology also supplied mother board chipsets - a PS2 compatible chipset, Oak enjoyed modest success in the value segment of the market, but without an effective Windows accelerator, ultimately failed to remain competitive. In 1994, Sun Microsystems decided to change the name of their new language from Oak to Java because Oak was already trademarked by Oak Technology. However, the company could not maintain growth and the stock price declined substantially, oTI037C - 8-bit VGA chipset, with up to 256KB of DRAM. Provided support for VGA, EGA & CGA display modes, most are only able to do standard VGA modes. Supports up to 512KB of DRAM, oTI077 - Enhanced version of the OTI067. Includes support for 1MB and up to 65MHz dot clock, capable of resolutions up to 1024x768x256 colors in non-interlaced mode, and up to 1280x1024x16 colors interlaced. OTI087 - One of the first VLB chipsets available, has a 16-bit external data path, and a 32-bit internal memory controller data path. Maximum BIOS resolutions are 1024x768x256 non-interlaced and 1280x1024x256 interlaced, maximum dot clock is 80 MHz, but is usually coupled with the OTI068 clock generator capable of frequencies up to 78 MHz. This chipset supports up to 2MB of 70/70R ns DRAM, spitfire - OTI 64105/64107 - 64-bit DRAM chipset. Provides 2D/GUI acceleration features comparable to other 64-bit accelerators of its time, spitfire - OTI64111 - 64-bit PCI/ISA 2D chipset with integrated 135MHz RAMDAC. Eon - OTI64217 - Supports EDO and SGRAM, Warp 5 - OTI64317 - During the late 1990s, Oak was developing their first and only 2D/3D graphics accelerator chip. Warp 5 was to be a tile-based deferred renderer, similar to PowerVRs chipsets, in the same vein as the S3 ViRGE chip, the Warp 5 was pin-compatible with a 2D-only predecessor. The chip was never released because ATI acquired the technology and it was Oaks final mainstream graphics chip development effort. This graphics processor was based on a concept and had many similarities to Microsofts Talisman architecture
16.
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
17.
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
18.
8-bit color
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8-bit color graphics is a method of storing image information in a computers memory or in an image file, such that each pixel is represented by one 8-bit byte. The maximum number of colors that can be displayed at any one time is 256, there are two forms of 8-bit color graphics. The most common uses a palette of 256 colors, where each of the 256 entries in the palette map is given red, green. In most color maps, each color is chosen from a palette of 16,777,216 colors. But in the original VGA cards 320x200 mode,256 on-screen colors could be chosen from a palette of 262,144 colors, some older cards prior to the VGA can only choose the 256-color palette from 4,096 colors. The other form is where the 8 bits directly describe red, green and this second form is often called 8-bit truecolor, as it does not use a palette at all, and is thus more similar to the 15-bit, 16-bit, and 24-bit truecolor modes. Bit 76543210 Data R R R G G G B B Most 8-bit image formats store a local palette of 256 colors in addition to the raw image data. If such an image is to be displayed on 8-bit graphics hardware and this can result in other images on the screen having wildly distorted colors due to differences in their palettes. For this reason, on 8-bit graphics hardware, programs such as web browsers must address this issue when simultaneously displaying multiple images from different sources. Each image may have its own palette, but the colors in each image will be remapped to a single palette, currently, most graphics hardware runs in 24-bit truecolor or 32-bit truecolor, and this problem is largely a thing of the past. However, some remote desktop software can switch to 8-bit color to conserve bandwidth, planar Packed pixel 15/16-bit color 24-bit color Color depth List of palettes
19.
High color
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High color graphics is a method of storing image information in a computers memory such that each pixel is represented by two bytes. Usually the color is represented by all 16 bits, but some also support 15-bit high color. More recently, high color has been used by Microsoft to distinguish display systems that can make use of more than 8-bits per color channel from traditional 8-bit per color channel formats and this is a distinct usage from the 15-bit or 16-bit formats traditionally associated with the phrase high color. This allows 32,768 possible colors for each pixel, when all 16 bits are used, one of the components gets an extra bit, allowing 64 levels of intensity for that component, and a total of 65,536 available colors. This can lead to discrepancies in encoding, e. g. when one wishes to encode the 24-bit color RGB with 16 bits. The red and blue channels will take the five most significant bits, the green channel, with six bits of precision, will have a binary value of 001010, or 10 on a scale from 0 to 63. Because of this, the color RGB will have a purple tinge when displayed in 16 bits. Note that 40 on a scale from 0 to 255 is 15. 7%, green is usually chosen for the extra bit in 16 bits because the human eye has its highest sensitivity for green shades. For a demonstration, look closely at the picture where dark shades of red, green. Readers with normal vision should see the individual shades of green relatively easily, while the shades of red should be difficult to see, and the shades of blue are likely indistinguishable. More rarely, some systems support having the extra bit of depth on the red or blue channel. As a result, some image formats can save paletted 16-bit images with an embedded CLUT, 24-bit color 30/36/48-bit color Color depth Planar Packed pixel List of monochrome and RGB palettes — 15-bit RGB and 16-bit RGB sections
20.
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
21.
S3 Graphics
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S3 Graphics, Ltd is an American computer graphics company. The company is perhaps best known for its ViRGE and its improved successor Savage 3D. The new company focused on the graphics market, and became a major player in this space. The company was purchased by HTC in 2011, although primarily a mobile technology company, they still produce graphics accelerators for home computers under the S3 Chrome brand name. S3 was founded and incorporated in January 1989 by Dado Banatao, on March 5,1993, S3 began an Initial Public Offering of 2,000,000 shares of common stock on Nasdaq. The joint venture, S3 Graphics, continues to develop and market based on the S3 graphics technology. The reformed company carried over a substantial cash pile from the profitable TRIO days and an investment in UMC. On November 15,2000, S3 changed its name to SONICBlue, the new business model focused on digital media and information appliance opportunities while the graphics division was sold to VIA Technologies as S3 Graphics. ReplayTV, Rio, and GoVideo were some of the brands developed by SONICBlue, on March 21,2003 SONICBlue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. S3 Graphics first only developed graphic cores for VIA IGP chipset while some years later they began to produce graphics accelerators for home computers under the Chrome brand name. These include the Deltachrome, Gammachrome, Chrome S27 and Chrome 440GTX, on July 6,2011 it was announced that HTC Corporation would buy VIA Technologies stake in S3 Graphics thus becoming the majority owner of S3 Graphics. S3 produces graphics cards primarily for PCs, while the earlier products such as the TRIO range were 2D only, later 3D functionality was added with the ViRGE and then Savage cards. More recently S3 chipsets have been sold as integrated VIA northbridge parts, however these units are also available for PCI-E. The Chrome 440 series supports DirectX10.1, HD Blu-ray video and their latest graphics card, the Chrome 530gt supports DirectX10.1, OpenGL3. The 64 bit versions were S3s most successful product range, ViRGE, VX, DX, GX, GX2, Trio3D - S3s first Windows 3D-accelerators. Sold well to OEMs mainly because of low price and excellent 2D-performance, Savage 3D,4,2000 - S3s first recognizably modern 3D hardware implementation. Poor yields meant actual clock speeds were 30% below expectations, S3 Texture Compression went on to become an industry standard, and the Savage3Ds DVD acceleration was market leading at introduction. Savage2000 was announced as the first chip with integrated Transformation and Lighting co-processor, integrated functionality enabled attractive pricing, and solid features for competitive prices remained a hallmark of S3s strategy
22.
Rambus
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Rambus Incorporated, founded in 1990, is an American technology licensing company known primarily for their development of RDRAM. Rambus, a California company, was incorporated in 1990 and re-incorporated in the state of Delaware in 1997, the company was listed on NASDAQ in 1997 under the code RMBS. As of February 2006, Rambus derived the majority of its revenue by licensing patents for chip interfaces to its customers. According to the Wall Street Journal, history of Rambus has been marked by litigation, Rambus share price has ranged between a high of nearly $150 in 2000 to a low of approximately $3 in 2002 with a 4,1 split on June 15,2000. Rambus share price in the first quarter of 2010 was between $20 and $24, giving the firm a market value of around $2.5 billion. An early version of RDRAM, base RDRAM, was used in the Nintendo 64 that was released in 1996, the first PC motherboards with support for RDRAM were released in 1999. This was significantly faster than the standard, PC133 SDRAM. Some disadvantages of RDRAM technology, however, included significantly increased latency, power dissipation as heat, manufacturing complexity, PC800 RDRAM operated with a minimum latency of 45 ns, compared to 15 ns for PC133 SDRAM. RDRAMs can also be told to increase their latencies in order to prevent the possibility of two or more chips transmitting at the time and causing a collision. RDRAM memory chips also put out significantly more heat than SDRAM chips, RDRAM was also two to three times the price of PC133 SDRAM due to manufacturing costs, license fees and other market factors. With the introduction of the Intel 840 chipset, dual-channel support was added for PC800 RDRAM and this was followed in 2002 by the Intel 850E chipset, which introduced PC1066 RDRAM, increasing total dual-channel bandwidth to 4266 MB/s. Also in 2002, Intel released the E7205 chipset, which introduced dual-channel DDR support for a bandwidth of 4266 MB/s. In 2003, Intel released the 875P chipset, and along with it dual-channel DDR400, with a total bandwidth of 6400 MB/s, it marked the end of RDRAM as a technology with competitive performance. Rambus also developed and licensed its XDR DRAM technology, notably used in the PlayStation 3, in the early 1990s, Rambus was invited to join the JEDEC. Rambus had been trying to interest memory manufacturers in licensing their proprietary memory interface, during the later Infineon v. Rambus trial. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected this theory of bad faith in its decision overturning the fraud conviction Infineon achieved in the first trial, in 2000, Rambus began filing lawsuits against the largest memory manufacturers, claiming that they owned SDRAM and DDR technology. Seven manufacturers, including Samsung, quickly settled with Rambus and agreed to pay royalties on SDRAM, in May 2001, Rambus was found guilty of fraud for having claimed that it owned SDRAM and DDR technology, and all infringement claims against memory manufacturers were dismissed. In October 2003, the U. S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, thus, the case returned to Virginia per the CAFC ruling
23.
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
24.
Texture mapping
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Texture mapping is a method for defining high frequency detail, surface texture, or color information on a computer-generated graphic or 3D model. Its application to 3D graphics was pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1974, texture mapping originally referred to a method that simply wrapped and mapped pixels from a texture to a 3D surface. A texture map is an image applied to the surface of a shape or polygon and this may be a bitmap image or a procedural texture. They may be stored in image file formats, referenced by 3d model formats or material definitions. They may have 1-3 dimensions, although 2 dimensions are most common for visible surfaces, for use with modern hardware, texture map data may be stored in swizzled or tiled orderings to improve cache coherency. Rendering APIs typically manage texture map resources as buffers or surfaces and they usually contain RGB color data, and sometimes an additional channel for alpha blending especially for billboards and decal overlay textures. It is possible to use the channel for other uses such as specularity. Multiple texture maps may be combined for control over specularity, normals, displacement, multiple texture images may be combined in texture atlases or array textures to reduce state changes for modern hardware. Modern hardware often supports cube map textures with multiple faces for environment mapping and they may be acquired by scanning/digital photography, authored in image manipulation software such as Photoshop, or painted onto 3D surfaces directly in a 3D paint tool such as Mudbox or zbrush. This process is akin to applying patterned paper to a white box. Every vertex in a polygon is assigned a texture coordinate and this may be done through explicit assignment of vertex attributes, manually edited in a 3D modelling package through UV unwrapping tools. It is also possible to associate a procedural transformation from 3d space to space with the material. This might be accomplished via planar projection or, alternatively, cylindrical or spherical mapping, more complex mappings may consider the distance along a surface to minimize distortion. These coordinates are interpolated across the faces of polygons to sample the texture map during rendering, UV unwrapping tools typically provide a view in texture space for manual editing of texture coordinates. Some rendering techniques such as subsurface scattering may be performed approximately by texture-space operations, multitexturing is the use of more than one texture at a time on a polygon. For instance, a light map texture may be used to light a surface as an alternative to recalculating that lighting every time the surface is rendered. Microtextures or detail textures are used to add higher frequency details, and dirt maps may add weathering and variation, modern graphics may use in excess of 10 layers for greater fidelity which are combined using shaders. Bump mapping has become popular in recent video games, as graphics hardware has become powerful enough to accommodate it in real-time, the way that samples are calculated from the texels is governed by texture filtering
25.
Bilinear filtering
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Bilinear filtering is a texture filtering method used to smooth textures when displayed larger or smaller than they actually are. Most of the time, when drawing a textured shape on the screen, because of this, most pixels will end up needing to use a point on the texture that is between texels, assuming the texels are points in the middle of their respective cells. Bilinear filtering uses these points to perform bilinear interpolation between the four texels nearest to the point that the pixel represents. In both cases, the data can be seen as a two-dimensional array of values z i j. The data points used in bilinear filtering are the 2x2 points surrounding the location for which the color is to be interpolated, additionally, one does not have to compute the actual coefficients of the function f, computing the value f is sufficient. The largest integer not larger than x shall be called, and we have x 1 =, x 2 = +1, y 1 =, y 2 = +1. The data points used for interpolation are taken from the texture / bitmap and assigned to z 11, z 12, z 21, and z 22. Similar savings can be achieved with all bi kinds of filtering, in the case of texture mapping, a constant x or y is rarely if ever encountered, and because todays graphics hardware is highly parallelized, there would be no time savings anyway. Another way of writing the bilinear interpolation formula is f = + This code assumes that the texture is square, that no mipmapping comes into play, the location of UV-coordinates is at center of texel. For example, are values for 2x2 texture, Trilinear filtering, though somewhat more complex, can make this transition smooth throughout. A Hermite filter, which is the only cubic that adds neither blurring nor ringing, does not anti-alias any better than linear interpolation does, the red numbers represent texels that would not be used in calculating the 3-texel texture at all. There are a few ways to handle this, Wrap the texture, so that the last texel in a row also comes right before the first, and this works best when the texture is being tiled. Make the area outside the texture all one color and this may be of use for a texture designed to be laid over a solid background or to be transparent. Repeat the edge texels out to infinity and this works best if the texture is not designed to be repeated. Anisotropic filtering Bilinear interpolation Trilinear filtering Lanczos resampling
26.
Gouraud shading
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Gouraud shading, named after Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes. Gouraud first published the technique in 1971, using these estimates, lighting computations based on a reflection model, e. g. the Phong reflection model, are then performed to produce colour intensities at the vertices. For each screen pixel that is covered by the polygonal mesh, Gouraud shading is considered superior to flat shading and requires significantly less processing than Phong shading, but usually results in a faceted look. In comparison to Phong shading, Gouraud shadings strength and weakness lies in its interpolation, the problem is easily spotted in a rendering which ought to have a specular highlight moving smoothly across the surface of a model as it rotates. While this problem can be fixed by increasing the density of vertices in the object, list of common shading algorithms Blinn–Phong shading model Phong shading
27.
Alpha compositing
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In computer graphics, alpha compositing is the process of combining an image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render image elements in separate passes, for example, compositing is used extensively when combining computer-rendered image elements with live footage. In order to combine these image elements correctly, it is necessary to keep an associated matte for each element. To store matte information, the concept of a channel was introduced by Alvy Ray Smith in the late 1970s. In a 2D image element, which stores a color for each pixel, additional data is stored in the alpha channel with a value between 0 and 1. A value of 0 means that the pixel does not have any information and is transparent. A value of 1 means that the pixel is opaque because the geometry completely overlapped the pixel, if an alpha channel is used in an image, there are two common representations that are available, straight alpha, and premultiplied alpha. With straight alpha, the RGB components represent the color of the object or pixel, with premultiplied alpha, the RGB components represent the color of the object or pixel, adjusted for its opacity by multiplication. A more obvious advantage of this is that, in certain situations, however, the most significant advantages of using premultiplied alpha are for correctness and simplicity rather than performance, premultiplied alpha allows correct filtering and blending. In addition, premultiplied alpha allows regions of alpha blending. Assuming that the color is expressed using straight RGBA tuples. If the color were fully green, its RGBA would be, however, if this pixel uses premultiplied alpha, all of the RGB values are multiplied by 0.5 and then the alpha is appended to the end to yield. In this case, the 0.5 value for the G channel actually indicates 100% green intensity, for this reason, knowing whether a file uses straight or premultiplied alpha is essential to correctly process or composite it. Premultiplied alpha has some advantages over normal alpha blending because premultiplied alpha blending is associative. Moreover, premultiplied alpha has a representation for transparent pixels. Ordinary interpolation without premultiplied alpha leads to RGB information leaking out of fully transparent regions, when interpolating or filtering images with abrupt borders between transparent and opaque regions, this can result in borders of colors that were not visible in the original image. Errors also occur in areas of semitransparancy because the RGB components are not correctly weighted, with the existence of an alpha channel, it is possible to express compositing image operations using a compositing algebra. For example, given two image elements A and B, the most common compositing operation is to combine the images such that A appears in the foreground and this can be expressed as A over B
28.
QEMU
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QEMU is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor that performs hardware virtualization. QEMU is a virtual machine monitor, it emulates CPUs through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of device models. It also can be used together with KVM in order to run virtual machines at near-native speed, QEMU can also do CPU emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to run on another. QEMU was written by Fabrice Bellard and is free software and is licensed under GNU General Public License. Various parts are released under BSD license, GNU Lesser General Public License or other GPL-compatible licenses, there is an option to use the proprietary FMOD library when running on Microsoft Windows, which, if used, disqualifies the use of a single open source software license. However, the default is to use DirectSound, QEMU has multiple operating modes, User-mode emulation In this mode QEMU runs single Linux or Darwin/macOS programs that were compiled for a different instruction set. System calls are thunked for endianness and for 32/64 bit mismatches, fast cross-compilation and cross-debugging are the main targets for user-mode emulation. System emulation In this mode QEMU emulates a full computer system and it can be used to provide virtual hosting of several virtual computers on a single computer. KVM Hosting Here QEMU deals with the setting up and migration of KVM images and it is still involved in the emulation of hardware, but the execution of the guest is done by KVM as requested by QEMU. Xen Hosting QEMU is involved only in the emulation of hardware, QEMU can save and restore the state of the virtual machine with all programs running. Guest operating-systems do not need patching in order to run inside QEMU and these include, hard disks, CD-ROM drives, network cards, audio interfaces, and USB devices. USB devices can be emulated, or the hosts USB devices can be used. Virtual disk images can be stored in a format that only take up disk space that the guest OS actually uses. This way, an emulated 120 GB disk may occupy only a few hundred megabytes on the host, the QCOW2 format also allows the creation of overlay images that record the difference from another base image file. This provides the possibility for reverting the emulated disks contents to an earlier state, for example, a base image could hold a fresh install of an operating system that is known to work, and the overlay images are used. Should the guest system become unusable, the user can delete the overlay, QEMU can emulate network cards which share the host systems connectivity by doing network address translation, effectively allowing the guest to use the same network as the host. The virtual network cards can connect to network cards of other instances of QEMU or to local TAP interfaces. Network connectivity can also be achieved by bridging a TUN/TAP interface used by QEMU with a non-virtual Ethernet interface on the host OS using the host OSs bridging features
29.
Bochs
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Bochs is a portable IA-32 and x86-64 IBM PC compatible emulator and debugger mostly written in C++ and distributed as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It supports emulation of the processor, memory, disks, display, Ethernet, BIOS, many guest operating systems can be run using the emulator including DOS, several versions of Microsoft Windows, BSDs, Linux, Xenix and Rhapsody. Bochs runs on many host operating systems, including Android, iOS, Linux, Mac OS X, PlayStation 2, Bochs is mostly used for operating system development and to run other guest operating systems inside already running host operating systems. It can also be used to run older software – such as PC games – which will not run on non-compatible, Bochs started as a program with a commercial license, at the price of US$25, for use as-is. If a user needed to link it to other software, that user would have to negotiate a special license and that changed on 22 March 2000, when Mandrakesoft bought Bochs from lead developer Kevin Lawton and released it for Linux under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Bochs emulates the hardware needed by PC operating systems, including drives, CD drives. It doesnt utilize any host CPU virtualization features, therefore is slower than most virtualization, rather than emulation and it provides additional security by completely isolating the guest OS from the hardware. Bochs also has extensive debugging features and it is widely used for OS development, as it saves the need for constant system restarts. The PS2 version was ported by KarasQ
30.
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
31.
Super video graphics array
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Super Video Graphics Array or Ultra Video Graphics Array, almost always abbreviated to Super VGA, Ultra VGA or just SVGA or UVGA is a broad term that covers a wide range of computer display standards. Originally, it was an extension to the VGA standard first released by IBM in 1987, unlike VGA—a purely IBM-defined standard—Super VGA was never formally defined. The closest to a definition was in the VBE extensions defined by the Video Electronics Standards Association. When used as a specification, in contrast to VGA or XGA for example. Though Super VGA cards appeared in the year as VGA. In that first version, it defined support for a resolution of 800x600 4-bit pixels. Each pixel could therefore be any of 16 different colors and it was quickly extended to 1024x768 8-bit pixels, and well beyond that in the following years. In consequence, so far as the monitor is concerned, there is no limit to the number of different colors that can be displayed. This applies to any VGA or Super VGA monitor, while the output of a VGA or Super VGA video card is analog, the internal calculations the card performs in order to arrive at these output voltages are entirely digital. Even so, the graphics chip vendors were producing parts for high-color video cards within just a few months of Super VGAs introduction. Monitor manufacturers sometimes advertise their products as XGA or Super XGA, in practice this means little, since all Super VGA monitors manufactured since the later 1990s have been capable of at least XGA and usually considerably higher performance. SVGA uses a VGA connector, the same DE-15 as the original standard, see also Digital Visual Interface which is a common non-analog cable for SVGA and other resolutions. Some of the early SuperVGA manufacturers were, Ahead Technologies Not related with Nero AG Amdek AST Research, ATI Technologies Chips and Technologies Cirrus Logic Compaq Everex Genoa Systems Orchid Technology Western Digitals Paradise Inc. Sigma Designs STB Systems V-RAM VGA ) Willow Trident Microsystems SVGA effectively supported resolutions like 1280x800 and higher
32.
RAMDAC
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The logical color number from the display memory is fed into the address inputs of the SRAM to select a palette entry to appear on the data output of the SRAM. This entry is composed of three separate values corresponding to the three components of the desired physical color, each component value is fed to a separate DAC, whose analog output goes to the monitor, and ultimately to one of its three electron guns. As the use of DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and other interface technology becomes increasingly mainstream. DAC word lengths range usually from 6 to 10 bits, the SRAMs word length is three times the DACs word length. The SRAM acts as a lookup table. If the DACs word length is also 8 bits, we have a 256 x 24-bit SRAM which allows a selection of 256 out of 16777216 possible colors for the display. The contents of this SRAM can be altered when no pixel needs to be generated for transmission to the display, a synchronization pulse is required to maintain vertical picture stability. Therefore, a vertical blanking pulse is generated for every frame and this vertical blanking pulse is not visible on the display, nor is any pixel sent. Therefore, the D/A is idle and can allow the user to modify the SRAM color lookup table, the SRAM can usually be bypassed and the DACs can be fed directly by display data, for True color modes. In many newer graphics cards, the RAMDAC can be clocked much faster in true color modes, as of 2006, the DAC of a modern graphics card runs at a clock rate of 400 MHz. However, video cards based on the XGI Volari XP10 run at 420 MHz DAC, the highest documented DAC frequency ever achieved on a production video card for the PC platform is 550 MHz, set by BarcoMed 5MP2 Aura 76Hz by Barco. The term RAMDAC did not enter into common PC-terminology until IBM introduced the IBM VGA display adapter in 1987, the IBM VGA adapter used the INMOS G171 RAMDAC. The INMOS VGA RAMDAC was a chip, featured a 256-color display from a palette of 262,144 possible values. As clone manufacturers copied IBM VGA hardware, they copied the INMOS VGA RAMDAC. Another innovation was Edsuns CEGDAC, which featured hardware-assisted spatial anti-aliasing for line/vector draw-operations, consequently, the market for standalone RAMDACs disappeared. Today, RAMDACs are still manufactured and sold for niche applications, in modern PCs, the RAMDAC are integrated into the display controller chip, which itself may be mounted on an add-in-board or integrated into the motherboard core-logic chipset. The original purpose of the RAMDAC, to provide a CLUT-based display-mode, is rarely used, however, many CAD and video editing applications use hardware overlay, combined with the programmable palette, to ensure the user interface does not disrupt the rendering of editing window. This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the terms of the GFDL
33.
Megabyte
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The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB, but sometimes MByte is used, the unit prefix mega is a multiplier of 1000000 in the International System of Units. Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes of information and this definition has been incorporated into the International System of Quantities. However, in the computer and information fields, several other definitions are used that arose for historical reasons of convenience. A common usage has been to one megabyte as 1048576bytes. However, most standards bodies have deprecated this usage in favor of a set of binary prefixes, less common is a convention that used the megabyte to mean 1000×1024 bytes. The megabyte is commonly used to measure either 10002 bytes or 10242 bytes, the interpretation of using base 1024 originated as a compromise technical jargon for the byte multiples that needed to be expressed by the powers of 2 but lacked a convenient name. As 1024 approximates 1000, roughly corresponding to the SI prefix kilo-, in 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed standards for binary prefixes requiring the use of megabyte to strictly denote 10002 bytes and mebibyte to denote 10242 bytes. By the end of 2009, the IEC Standard had been adopted by the IEEE, EU, ISO, the Mac OS X10.6 file manager is a notable example of this usage in software. Since Snow Leopard, file sizes are reported in decimal units, base 21 MB =1048576 bytes is the definition used by Microsoft Windows in reference to computer memory, such as RAM. This definition is synonymous with the binary prefix mebibyte. Mixed 1 MB =1024000 bytes is the used to describe the formatted capacity of the 1.44 MB3. 5inch HD floppy disk. Semiconductor memory doubles in size for each address lane added to an integrated circuit package, the capacity of a disk drive is the product of the sector size, number of sectors per track, number of tracks per side, and the number of disk platters in the drive. Changes in any of these factors would not usually double the size, sector sizes were set as powers of two for convenience in processing. It was an extension to give the capacity of a disk drive in multiples of the sector size, giving a mix of decimal. Depending on compression methods and file format, a megabyte of data can roughly be, a 4 megapixel JPEG image with normal compression. Approximately 1 minute of 128 kbit/s MP3 compressed music,6 seconds of uncompressed CD audio. A typical English book volume in plain text format, the human genome consists of DNA representing 800 MB of data
34.
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
35.
Video acceleration
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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
36.
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
