Graphics processing with the 88110 RISC microprocessor

The author presents details of the instructions and data types provided by the 88110's graphics unit. She also gives several graphics processing examples using both floating point and graphics instructions to achieve high performance. She points out that the 88110 combines sustained high performance general processor, graphics support, and floating point performance together on one chip. The graphics unit is flexible in supporting floating point, fixed point, and packed pixels. Pixel packing and unpacking are supported for manipulation of color intensity data types and packed pixel data types. A compare instruction can perform two Z-buffer compares in parallel. Pixel multiply is supported for compositing images together. A pixel rotate and all the other bit field instructions supported by the 88000 architecture provide a powerful means of manipulating data. The 88110 also maintains high bus bandwidth and has on chip multiprocessor support. All of these features combined make the 88110 well suited for central processing and graphics processing. This can eliminate the need for a secondary processor in a graphics system.>