CompuServe Messages

Paul, I don't beleive the ibm/apple deal well have much of an impact on anybody for at least two years, since it will take them at least this long to design/build/program anything for market. Probably closer to three years! The question is – What is CBM going to do in the mean time? I feel the current chipset is falling behind when compared to superVGA displays on the clones, and 8 bit or 24 bit cards on the apples, and all of these devices are supported by the operating system! A couple of years ago I thought CBM could do a lot of improvements to the chipset by going 32 bit (twice the data could be accessed in the same time) and by going to at least twice the clock rate for the custom chips, for another two times improvement. Hmmm.. Thinking about this, there would still be hope! The next generation chipset should go to the hilt – four times faster clock rate (28 MHz bus cycle clock rate, if this is possible, and still leave time for the cpu to get on here) and 32 bit access. This would be an overall improvement of 8 times – 8 times as much data could be read in the same time. In the ECS chipset they already have the capability to go to 35 nS pixel resolution (with catches) compared to 70 nS pixel resolution we have now in Hi-res, so if you apply some math to these figures, you would be able to get a 1280 pixel wide, 256 color mode with no system contention. In the current system, 640 wide 16 color (4 bit) has chip bus contention, but 8 color (3 bit does not. Since we can read 8 times as much data, 8 = 2*4, two time 640 = 1280 and four times 4 bits = 16 bits (with contention), but four times 3 bits = 12 bits with no contention. For 256 color display we only need 8 bits (hopefully with 24 bit pallette registers), or they could take all 12 bits, feed it to the D/A and you have 1280 pixels in 4096 colors with no contention. Hmmm… re-applying numbers and you should be able to get 640 pixels with 24 bits/pixel. Gee, isn't that what we all want? There is hope yet! [ MORE ]