[rescue] Sun drivers/info for Pixar graphics system?

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Sun, 11 Nov 2001, Paul Sladen wrote:

> On Fri, 9 Nov 2001, Corda Albert J DLVA wrote:
> >
> > I was rooting around at a couple of used computer
> > stores yesterday and ran across something interesting...
> > A large (rack mountable) granite-colored box with
> > the logo PIXAR on the front. (it looks _very_ neat!
> 
> >From memory (you should Google to right the story right), but over the year
> Pixar has been trough about 3 different business cases.  Only the last one
> of which is CGI.  IIRC one of the previous was Video Capture hardware...
> that's probably what this is.

If it is big, square, grey and has a dimple in the middle of the front
face. Then it is the Pixar Graphics Computer. Which is a mid-80s top of
the line image generator. It is basically a SIMD dedicated machine for
rendering complex scenes (not interactively mind you), and then dump them
into film/screen. It requires NeWS to work, so I assume it can not be used
under "moder" sparc machines.

>From some old Byte article [G. Speckert '99]
"The Pixar Image Computer (PIC) was built around a channel processor, or
Chap, which could perform the same instruction on four data channels, such
as red, green, blue, and alpha. Imaging applications do this often. Each
channel was 12 bits deep, allowing for photographic quality from the fully
anti-aliased Pixar software suite. A Chap could also perform tile-based
algorithms four-way parallel in "accordion mode" on a 12-bit monochrome
channel. The video frame store processor (FSP) included four channels
of 2-megapixel memory, a 10-bit-in/10-bit-out lookup table (LUT) and
10-bit digital to analog converters (DACs) for high-quality monitors.
.....
.....
The Chap was programmed by a 96-bit instruction word, compared with the
Velocity Engine's 128 bit instructions. The Chap hardware was a four-way
parallel network of multipliers, scratchpads, arithmetic units, and pixel
I/O buffers. The software controlled the routing of information through
the hardware components. The key to performance was to establish a
pipeline, whose depth was a function of the creativity of the software
developer, limited by the sum of the hardware. Clever software could
perform an operation on multiple RGBA pixels at different stages of their
transformation each hardware clock cycle. "


Pixar has *always* been CGI. They did HW in the early stages of the 
company, simply because there were not that many computer graphics
architectures. These machines were actually very widely used in imaging
applications, specially medial imaging. This was the original HW branch of 
implementation for their Renderman architecture.

Nice beast, were did the original poster get it? I would literally kill
for one of these :-).

Now if I can only get the E&S freedom box that I have under my desk!