Guess what this is....

[Ailuros]

Well your last excuse was interviewing b3d members for a job(took 10 days)
whats you excuse now

Could be he didn't get permission to reveal anything further. While discussing vaporware could have some technical interest for historical reasons, it'll still remain vaporware.

Series5 (just don't ask why marketing decided to call SGX also "Series5" since it's actually one generation ahead) was a high end GPU project aimed for PC/consoles and arcade systems. How any IHV's management expects to develop and engineer such a design only with miniscule resources is beyond me and IMHO the primary reason why it flundered. In that regard it's highly unlikely any IHV to want to dig out any of their corpses well hidden in the basement.

The lesson IMG probably learned (and some of us following them through the years) is that they aren't and most likely won't be (for many years to come) able to risk another (single chip) high end design. IP is still not and likely never will be ideal for the standalone GPU markets, unless major changes occur in those which aren't all that likely.

The only other thing I can gather out of this thread is that the PMX590 was real and not just some mythical on paper design. Series4 was shelved after ST Microelectronics shut down its graphics department and Series5/PMX590 was most likely already in an advanced development stage at this point. IMG's turn to concentrate on the embedded market starting with MBX was the best tactical decision they ever made since the company started out as Videologic.

 

[Davros]

I'm only having a bit of fun with Rys
But seriously M.I.5 should hire this guy, because trying to get any info out of him is next to impossible

 

[Rys]

I've just been busy, and the ImgTec oldies that I'd need to talk to have been holidaying or are otherwise engaged. It's hard enough getting Simon's time for proper work, never mind this bit of fun And who says I don't work for MI5 already?

 

[Davros]

And who says I don't work for MI5 already?

It wasnt me, It was him, no,no,no please not the anal probe Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

 

[Davros]

ps: rys what the hell is this
http://www.ambry.com/240113-001.html

looks different to a pcx1 or 2 its not a 5dx or sonic ????

pps: wheres our secret info

 

[cjo]

Apparently it is a pre-pcx1 card before various components were integrated in to a single chip

 

[Davros]

you sure ? I dont remember anything from powervr before their own card
when the pcx1 was released by videologic I heard nothing about that card allready being on the market
I'M sure someone would of mentioned it was chosen by compaq that would of been a big endorsement

And if those 3 chips have been shrunk into 1 where are the ram chips on that thing ?
could be at the front but why is there 4 ?

 

[cjo]

There is a reference to a Midas 3 based card for compaq that shipped with some Presario systems on the PowerVR wikipedia page, I guess it could be one of those? That isn't sourced though, so I don't know where you'd find out information about it.

 

[Davros]

thanks for that, Its the first time ive ever heard anything about midas 3
wiki says its different to the pcx1 but little else

 

[Simon F]

Davros, that is a Midas3. FWIW the PCX1 board was Midas4. IIRC, the three big chips are -from bottom in clockwise order - a PCI bridge chip, [UPDATED] TSP and ISP [/update]. A small number were shipped in compaq systems just prior to PCX1 delivery.

Again, IIRC, the ISP had dedicated RAM for the model data, and the TSP for textures.... but I could be mistaken. I thought I had one sitting in the shelves next to my desk tnat I could check, but it seems to have vanished.

There were also Midas 1 & 2 PC cards that were intended as development systems for a "Midas Arcade" board that preceded them. The arcade board had at least one MIPS and multiple ISPs etc, but it became clear that the PC market was a better market so the arcade board was dropped.

 

[I.S.T.]

ISP, TSP?

 

[CarstenS]

Image and Texture Synthesis Processors, i.e. Framebuffer and TMU similar to the Voodoo Graphics' distributed functions perhaps?


edit: Did I mention how much I love this thread for all the retro goodness?

 

[Simon F]

@Carsten, except that it's a tile-based deferred renderer so, in effect, quite different.

 

[CarstenS]

Hah!

btw:
"Last edited by Simon F; 03-Nov-2011 at 16:06. Reason: Found my Midas 3"
If you ever run out of tiles to store it, I'd be happy to help out.

 

[cjo]

Hah!

btw:
"Last edited by Simon F; 03-Nov-2011 at 16:06. Reason: Found my Midas 3"
If you ever run out of tiles to store it, I'd be happy to help out.

He has quite a nice pile of old cards, which I'm sure that the history of is very interesting, but sadly SimonF has a tendancy to be very busy

I don't think he is running out of room at the moment though.

 

[[EOCF] Tim]

Wow, this is great, I just got my Midas 3 Compaq board out. Really wanted to do some testing on this one after having been in storage for ages. Frantically looking just about anywhere for a driver, but can't find any. Stumbled on this topic by chance. Simon, Rys, can you help me out here? Board is the one picture below.

Though this has been cleared, I have to comment...
The one for AXE was huge and consisted four parts, IIRC. Of course Glaze did gained quite lot more than just the hunting ghost of Thor during respin to AXE. Yet the EDRAM blocks should be easily spottable as series of same looking areas. 8MB of eDRAM was quite lot in 0.22µm technology and so it should cover cleary big part of the mask.

I also spotted that someone here claimed to own only outside company AXE rev-B chip, but that's obiously plain wrong. Even though they are rare, about dozen or so existed outside the company when I got mine 6 years ago. I don't know how many of them have escaped since the company ended up as part of Qualcom. Yet the inventors of mentioned technology are not anymore working there and they might have something other venturies going on.

Rys: hopefully you got my PM.

I think I was the only one having mentioned Axe Rev-B the last few years, so I'm assuming you are talking about me?

I don't think I said there was only one Rev-B outside of the company, several people have got them. I was talking about the only Avalance3D board outside of the company. Mine is the only one out there in the wild, at least that is what Mika (Tuomi) told me.....I think he would know. I vaguely remember him telling me only about 5 were made. Quite a few reworks on the board below.

As for Glaze3D afaik silicon never materialized.

Glaze3D

 

[CarstenS]

Does the Avalanche3D work, drivers and all? Damn, I'd love to have one too.

 

[[EOCF] Tim]

Hey Carsten.

It might be sacrilege for some but I have never actually tried to. When I first received the card I did drop the driver word, it's been some time ago, but I remember never getting a direct answer. I should really get in contact again and get this going.

Anyway, don't mean to derail the topic. If anyone has got some Midas 3 drivers, pretty please send them my way.

 

[Davros]

Tim any help
http://www.video-drivers.com/drivers/18/18994.htm
or
http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=18994

Speaking of powervr cards ive never heard of I came across this

"release Date - It seems a rumour has got around that fabrication on PowerVR NG has allready begun, sales expected March/April time (Not definate though), Retail is meant to be around $100 (£75) ..... Kewl.

Features - The following are the features of the card as know at present (compiled by Gordon at PowerVR Global)
under $100 US for the initial 'Highlander'/PVRSG graphics card
2D/3D solution on 1 chip
deferred rendering of 120 Mpixels per second
1.2 million front facing, fully textured, lit and shadowed polygons per second with a peak rate of three million to four million polygons per second
geometry can be triangles, quads, and polygon strips
full CPU load balancing
full-floating point setup on chip
32-bit accurate floating point z-buffering with no RAM accesses
unified frame buffer and texture memory
VQ (vector quantization) texture compression with 8:1 compression ratios
2X AGP with sidebands and PCI (33 and 66 MHz)
full alpha blending modes supported
image super-sampling for full scene anti-aliasing
perspective correct bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic texture filtering
true perspective correct ARGB gouraud shading
specular highlighting with offset colour
environment mapping
volumetric effects (shadows, lens flare, etc)
multiple fog modes
bump mapping
full DirectX and OpenGL blending modes
3D in a Window
max resolution of 1600 by 1200 in 24 bit color
clock rate: most likely 100 MHz - 120 MHz
RAM/DAC (230Mhz)
manufactured in NEC's leading 0.25-micron process
up to 32 MBytes of memory access
MPEG 2 decode
DVD-assist
video IN and OUT
full support for DirectX 6, which is due this April
available April 1998 for evaluation
available in the marketplace: most likely May 1998
edit : I think its a neon 250

 

[CarstenS]

Sounds much like it, yes.