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SiliconGraphics Onyx Teardown

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The raster manager processes the image raster and also provides texturing capabilities.

the RM6 is available with 16 or 64MB texture memory, this is a 16MB version.

InfiniteReality can run with 1, 2, or 4 RM boards. Raster memory will increase in size with additional boards; texture memory increases in speed via interleaving.

8 TM ASICs control 32 SDRAMs (on the back of the board) which make up the texture memory

80 "image engines" are on 20 quad-core ASICs. These control the raster memory (framebuffer) as well as providing many image operations such as blending, dithering, etc. They can be thought of as a precursor to the "shaders" or "stream processors" on a modern day GPU

With a fully-realized modern InfiniteReality4 system (with 4 RM boards per pipe and 16 pipes in a system), the system can contain up to 16GB texture memory and 160GB of framebuffer!

This makes for very nice pictures even on IMAX-sized curved screens with many projectors blended together to form a single image.

Such a system will fill many computer racks. They are still in commercial use throughout the world.

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