From: tony duell <[email protected]> > On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Steven M Jones <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Before anyone gets too excited about the blistering speed of the 60 >> MHz TMS34010, ... However, since it has a >> graphics-optimized instruction set, it was still able to do some >> things noticeably faster than the 16 MHz 80186 would have.
Price/performance for the tms34010 was terrible; it was somewhat faster at graphics (bit-oriented) ops than an 80186 (or other contemporary processor), but it was several times more expensive. TI tried to sell around that by claiming it was a complete general purpose processor in addition to graphics processor so you could build a whole system using the tms34010 as the brains. Unfortunately, if you actually did that, you found that it could manage kbd/mouse/net *or* do graphics, but not really both. It was also integer-only, and had a slow, 16-bit memory interface that killed performance unless you used expensive VRAMs (this was before VGA made VRAM cheap). And TIGA never really took off. Bonus: the development tools were pretty awful. One of the weirder C compilers I've used. Intel came up with the i82786 around the same time that was cheaper, and it looked like you could cook up a cheap 80186+82786 X Term setup that would be competitive. However, I never saw a product like that, just a couple of PC/AT plugin cards (Belltech BLIT). > Somewhere I have a thing badged 'Princeton Ultra-X'...It uses an 80188 for I/O > (including 10Mbps ethernet). The Xserver is in EPROMs and appears to run on > the TMS34010 graphics processor. Yup...I worked for the company that designed those. Good times (really...I learned a *lot* about a lot of things), but glad I was an ops guy and not an engineer or developer. There were probably 20 other shops making X Terminals at the same time, 'cause that was the future. I recall having stacks to play with because the market for them evaporated far sooner than marketing predicted. KJ
