- Oct 28, 1999
- 7,271
- 0
- 0
In what has become a legacy...Honestly, the BitBoys name alone will either garner applause/anticipation, or straight-up laughter.
But this just might be the turning point that all the would-be BitBoys backers have been waiting for.
I was taking a short break from work, and saw this post by one of the Beyond3D regulars. I'll just rip the whole thing...I do believe that he did, in fact, translate this himself.
If you go to the original link, this translation is taken from a Finnish IT mag called "Micro PC," which was just released today.
Bitboys chip gets to the silicon
Limits of the modern silicon process are being tested in gfx chip development. Noormarkku based Bitboys was plannig to introduce PC-display adapters based on companys own graphics technology a year ago in Comdex. Instead they gave up the whole silicon implementation of chip, called Glaze3D at the time. A new, further developed design is in the silicon process at the moment. Also a follower to this chip is being designed. Chip under manufacturing has increased embedded memory, leading to the total size of 12 MB. Also the internal bus has been doubled to the width of 1024 bits.
"I know we have been shallow in our comments, but I can reveal that chip design is complete and chip is being manufactured", says Juha Taipale, general manager.
One aspect making the chip design harder was difference between embedded ram and logic. Embedded ram benefits from large capasitance (sp?) of the chips silicon, when on the other hand, it's vice versa with the logic. Large capacitance allows the use of small size memory cells, but same time increases the size chips area used for logic operations.
"In a sense, our graphics process is as hard to manufacture as state of art main cpu's.", comments ASIC-designer Harri Syrjä.