Oak Technology

Oak Technology was a supplier of semiconductor chips for sound cards, graphics cards and optical storage devices such as CD-ROM, CD-RW and DVD. In 2003, it was acquired by Zoran Corporation.

Oak Technology helped develop the ATAPI standard and provided the oakcdrom.sys CD-ROM driver that was ubiquitous on DOS-based systems in the mid-1990s.

History

Oak Technology, Inc was founded in 1987. During the late 1980s through the early 1990s, Oak was a supplier of PC graphics (SVGA) chipsets and PCBs. Oak Technology also supplied mother board chipsets - a PS2 compatible chipset and the Oaknote chipset for notebooks. Oak enjoyed modest success in the value segment (low-end) of the market, but without an effective Windows accelerator, ultimately failed to remain competitive.

In 1994, Sun Microsystems decided to change the name of their new language from Oak to Java because Oak was already trademarked by Oak Technology.^[1]

Products

OTI037C 8-bit VGA chipset, with up to 256KB of DRAM. Provided support for VGA, EGA & CGA diaplay modes. Most are only able to do standard VGA modes. (ie. up to 320x200x256 and up to 640x480x16).

OTI057/067 ISA SVGA chipsets. Supports up to 512KB of DRAM (usually 70/80 ns).

OTI077 Enhanced version of the OTI067. Includes support for 1MB and up to 65Mhz dot-clock. Capable of resolutions up to 1024x768x256 colors in Non-Interlaced mode, and up to 1280x1024x16 colors Interlaced.

OTI087 One of the first VLB chipsets available. Has a 16-bit external data path, and a 32-bit internal memory-controller data path. It features some acceleration hardware: register-based color expansion, hardware cursor, primitive BitBLT engine, 4-bit graphic latch and some other new (for its time) features. Maximum BIOS resolutions are 1024x768x256 Non-Interlaced and 1280x1024x256 interlaced. Maximum Dot-Clock is 80Mhz, but is usually coupled with the OTI068 clock generator capable of frequencies up to 78Mhz. This chipset supports up to 2MB of 70/70R ns DRAM.

Spitfire - OTI 64105/64107 64-bit DRAM chipset. Very rare.

Spitfire - OTI 64111 64-bit PCI/ISA 2D chipset. DRAM and EDO supported. Very Rare.

Eon - OTI 64217 Supports EDO and SGRAM. PCI chipset, 64-bit memory bus.

Warp 5

Warp 5 - OTI 64317

Warp 5 Test Board

Close-up of Warp 5 chip

During the late 1990s, Oak was developing their first and only 2D/3D graphics accelerator chip. Warp 5 was to be a tile-based deferred renderer (TBDR), similar to PowerVR's chipsets. In the same vein as the S3 ViRGE chip, the Warp 5 was pin-compatible with a 2D-only predecessor. The chip was never released because ATI acquired the technology. It was Oak's final mainstream graphics chip development effort.

This graphics processor was based on a region concept and had many similarities to Microsoft's Talisman architecture. The chip processed each region at a time and did on chip z-sorting and anti-aliasing. As a result, the chip did 24-bit floating point Z, sub-pixel anti-aliasing, order independent translucency, non-linear fogging and atmospheric effects and MIP-Mapping. Typically, such region based architectures are gated by the number of polygons that can be processed per region, but Oak claimed that there were no such limitations in the WARP 5.

The specifications included:

• 50m pixels/sec (all features turned on)
• EDO and SGRAM Memory Supported - 8MB
• On-chip Texture Cache
• 2D GUI acceleration
• Video Scaling in Y
• VBI support Including Intercast
• 220MHz RAMDAC
• Resolutions to 1600 X 1200
• Direct3D and BRender APIs supported
• OS support Windows 95 and Windows NT
• Packaging - 256 pin BGA
• Pin Compatibility with OAK OTI-74217 EON 2D GUI accelerator

Notes

1. ^ Kieron Murphy (1996-04-10). "So why did they decide to call it Java?". javaworld.com. http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-1996/jw-10-javaname.html. Retrieved 2009-08-03. 

References

• "Inside Look @ Metabyte" by Amer "Mossad" Ajami, October 13, 1998, retrieved December 26, 2005
• "Oak Warp 5 Review" by Rage's Hardware, Date Unknown, retrieved December 26, 2005
• "Video Card Benchmark Page" by Rage's Hardware, Date Unknown, retrieved December 26, 2005

External links

• http://list.driverguide.com/list/company745/ - some drivers for Oak graphics cards