TMS34010

The TMS34010 was the first programmable graphics processor integrated circuit (IC). First silicon was working at Texas Instruments (TI) in Houston in December 1985, and first shipment (a development board) was to IBM's workstation facility in Kingston, New York, in January 1986. Design took place at TI facilities in Bedford, UK and Houston, Texas, U.S.A.

The TMS34010 was a bit addressable, 32-bit processor, with two fifteen register files sharing a sixteenth stack pointer register. Its distinguishing characteristics from all other microprocessors up to that time included special instructions for two-dimensional graphics primitives, the first on-chip instruction cache (256 bytes), arbitrary variable-width data, and arithmetic operations on pixel data. It was distinguished from graphics chips that preceded it (such as the NEC 7220 products or the Hitachi 63484) by being truly programmable, instead of being limited to executing hardwired primitives. The cache was particularly useful for code fragments that implemented complex bit-level graphics operations. The TMS34010 was supported by a full ANSI compliant C compiler, and was capable of executing any general-purpose program in addition to graphics programs.

The successor to the TMS34010, the TMS34020 (1988), provided several enhancements including an interface for a special graphics floating point coprocessor, the TMS34082 (1989). The primary function of the TMS34082 was to allow the TMS340 architecture to generate high quality three dimensional (3D) graphics. The performance level of 60 million vertices per second was quite advanced at the time it appeared.

TI made an unsuccessful effort in 1987 and 1988 to convince games makers such as Nintendo and Sega to write 3D games and create a new console market. In 1987 TI provided the first demonstration of true real-time 3D games with stereo sound effects on a personal computer (PC), using a small TMS34010 adapter card (called "The Flippy"). The Flippy was designed as the basis of a game development system for consoles and as a PC gaming card in its own right. TI's effort foreshadowed the creation of 3D game consoles by both companies as well as Sony in the late 1990s, and the creation of the 3D game and graphics adapter markets in PCs.

MAME emulates TMS34010.

This chip was also used on a videocards for an Apollo/Domain workstations.

The TMS34010 was used in the first commercially successful Windows accelerators in 1990 and 1991, usually referred to as "TIGA" products (TI Graphics Architecture). Their success paved the way for products based upon various derivatives and clones of IBM's 8514 architecture. Part of the effort to make graphics accelerators useful required TI to convince Microsoft that the internal interfaces to its Windows Operating System had to be adaptable instead of hard-coded. Indeed all versions of Windows prior to Windows 3.0 were "hard-coded" to specific graphics hardware.

In many ways the TMS34010 and graphics team at TI were primary contributors to the evolutionary process that lead to current windows accelerators, the APIs used by Microsoft, and 3D gaming for both consoles and PCs.

References

* [http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/tms34010.html TMS34010 Product Specs]
* [http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/tms34020a.html TMS34020 Product Specs]