ARK Logic, Inc., simply known as ARK (an abbreviation of Advanced Rendering Kernels), was an American computer graphics hardware company active from 1993 to 2002 and based in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially the City of San José ( ; ), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is ...

. The company designed a number of 2D

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

s (GPUs), largely

PCI PCI may refer to: Business and economics * Payment card industry, businesses associated with debit, credit, and other payment cards ** Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a set of security requirements for credit card processors * Prov ...

-based, that saw moderate use in aftermarket

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a displa ...

s for personal computers in the 1990s.

History

Foundation (1993–1995)

ARK Logic was principally founded by Ruey "Ray" Lu in 1993 in

Santa Clara, California Santa Clara ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for "Clare of Assisi, Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of cities and towns i ...

. Lewis Eggebrecht, the chief designer of the

IBM Personal Computer The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible ''de facto'' standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a ...

, was hired as the chief scientific officer of ARK. The company released its first products to the market in October 1994, comprising a pair of GUI accelerators designed in-house by ARK. They were the ARK1000PV and the ARK2000PV, the former a 32-bit GUI accelerator and the latter a 64-bit GUI accelerator. Both used

DRAM Dram, DRAM, or drams may refer to: Technology and engineering * Dram (unit), a unit of mass and volume, and an informal name for a small amount of liquor, especially whisky or whiskey * Dynamic random-access memory, a type of electronic semicondu ...

and a host interface unit compatible with both

Peripheral Component Interconnect Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format ...

(PCI) and

VESA Local Bus The VESA Local Bus (usually abbreviated to VL-Bus or VLB) is a short-lived expansion bus introduced during the i486 generation of x86 IBM-compatible personal computers. Created by VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association), the VESA Local Bu ...

(VLB). The host interface unit also contains built-in intelligent cache to achieve sustained burst transactions over the PCI bus and zero-wait-state transactions over both PCI and VLB. ARK's first design win was with

Western Digital Western Digital Corporation is an American data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. Established in 1970, the company is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDDs). History 1970s Western Digital ...

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subsidiary, which chose the 32-bit ARK1000PV for their low-cost Bali 32 graphics accelerator card in November 1994.

Purchase by Integrated Circuit Systems (1995–1997)

Integrated Circuit Systems Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (IDT), was an American semiconductor company headquartered in San Jose, California. The company designed, manufactured, and marketed low-power, high-performance mixed-signal semiconductor products for the advan ...

(ICS), a manufacturer of

clock generator A clock generator is an electronic oscillator that produces a clock signal for use in synchronizing a circuit's operation. The output clock signal can range from a simple symmetrical square wave to more complex arrangements. The basic parts tha ...

s and

RAMDAC A Brooktree RAMDAC A RAMDAC (random-access memory digital-to-analog converter) is a combination of three fast digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with a small static random-access memory (SRAM) used in computer graphics display controllers or ...

s based in

Valley Forge, Pennsylvania The village of Valley Forge is an unincorporated settlement. It is located on the west side of Valley Forge National Historical Park at the confluence of Valley Creek and the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. The remaining village is in Schu ...

, announced in April 1995 that they had acquired a majority stake (51 percent) in ARK Logic for $7.3 million. The terms of the purchase allowed ICS to acquire the remaining 49 percent stake from the minority interests after 18 months based on fair market value. Following the purchase, ARK Logic moved their headquarters from Santa Clara to

. ICS' stake in ARK came two years after they had bought a majority stake in Turtle Beach Corporation, makers of

sound card A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term ''sound card'' is also applied to external audio ...

s and other audio peripherals for personal computers. The purchase of both Turtle Beach and ARK solidified ICS' pivot to multimedia products in the mid-1990s, although this ultimately proved short-lived. ARK earned their second design win with

Hercules Computer Technology Hercules Computer Technology, Inc. was a manufacturer of computer peripherals for IBM PC compatible, PCs and Macintosh, Macs founded in 1982. History Hercules was formed in 1982 in Hercules, California, by Van Suwannukul and Kevin Jenkins an ...

, who used ARK's 64-bit ARK2000PV to power their Stingray 64 graphics card. In August 1995, ARK scored another design win with

Diamond Multimedia Diamond Multimedia is an American company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players; however, the company began with the production of the TrackS ...

, providing the latter with the ARK2000PV graphics accelerator, which powered Diamond's popular Stealth64 graphics card. In December 1995, ARK introduced their followup to the ARK2000PV, the ARK2000MI, which made use of an ICS RAMDAC and included an

MPEG-1 MPEG-1 is a Technical standard, standard for lossy compression of video and Audio frequency, audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to about 1.5 Mbit/s (26:1 and 6:1 compression ratios respectively ...

decoder chip for full-screen video acceleration. In August 1996, ARK introduced the ARK2000MT, which replaced the generic RAMDAC with ICS' ICS5342 "GENDAC" (combination clock generator and RAMDAC) and upgraded the full-screen video accelerator chip to one that could decode

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods ...

video at 30 frames per second. The chip supported displaying at a maximum maximum resolution of 1600 by 1200 pixels at 16.7 million colors. The ARK2000MT made use in Hercules' updated Stingray 64 released that year. The ARK2000MI+, branded as the Quadro64 and released in May 1996, introduced the ARK Peripheral Expansion Bus (APEX), an semi-proprietary internal bus based on

VESA VESA (), formally known as Video Electronics Standards Association, is an American standards organization, technical standards organization for computer display standards. The organization was incorporated in California in July 1989To retrieve ...

's Video Module Interface proposal that allowed the chip to be used beyond strictly outputting computer graphics; for example, given the right ADC, the Quadro64 could be converted into a

TV tuner A TV tuner card is a kind of television tuner that allows television signals to be received by a computer. Most TV tuners also function as video capture cards, allowing them to record television programs onto a hard disk much like the digital vi ...

. Eggebrecht explored designing a

media processor A media processor, mostly used as an image/ video processor, is a microprocessor-based system-on-a-chip which is designed to deal with digital streaming data in real-time (e.g. display refresh) rates. These devices can also be considered a class ...

—a burgeoning class of DSP that aimed to integrate all multimedia functions into one monolithic IC—but he ultimately decided on a traditional parallelized approach with APEX.

Sale to Vision 2000 (1997–2002)

Sales in ARK Logic's chips slowed down significantly at the end of 1996. Besides a reference design board for a Quadro64-based TV tuner called the Quadro64TV announced in January 1997, the company released no new products that year. On January 13, 1997, Lu stepped down as

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

and president of ARK Logic, being replaced by Allan Havemose while remaining COO. In July 1997, ICS sold off 80 percent of their stake in ARK Logic to Vision 2000 Ventures, a holding company based in the

Cayman Islands The Cayman Islands () is a self-governing British Overseas Territories, British Overseas Territory, and the largest by population. The territory comprises the three islands of Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, which are located so ...

, relieving the company of $2.3 million of debt. Shortly after, ICS sold off Turtle Beach and relinquished its remaining minority stake in ARK. According to the ICS president Stav Prodromou, the acquisitions of ARK and Turtle Beach were "not well advised and were so far afield from what we do best they ended up hurting the company". In May 1998, ARK Logic announced the Tiger 3D, their first

3D accelerator A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal co ...

chip. It included up to 8 MB of

video memory Video random-access memory (VRAM) is dedicated computer memory used to store the pixels and other graphics data as a framebuffer to be rendered on a computer monitor. It often uses a different technology than other computer memory, in order to b ...

, 4 MB of

texture memory Texture memory is a type of digital storage that makes texture data readily available to video rendering processors (also known as GPUs), typically 3D graphics hardware. It was sometimes implemented as specialized RAM (TRAM) that is designed for ...

, a 250 MHz RAMDAC, a 24-bit

Z-buffer A z-buffer, also known as a depth buffer, is a type of data buffer used in computer graphics to store the depth information of Fragmentation (computing), fragments. The values stored represent the distance to the camera, with 0 being the closest ...

, and an 8-bit

stencil buffer A stencil buffer is an extra data buffer, in addition to the ''color buffer'' and '' Z-buffer'', found on modern graphics hardware. The buffer is per pixel and works on integer values, usually with a depth of one byte per pixel. The Z-buffe ...

. The company earned manufacturing commitments from

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...

and LG Semicon to produce the Tiger 3D. In February 1999, the company attempted to re-enter the 3D accelerator market with the Ark 8800 Cougar 3D, with its performance compared to

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

's i740 and ATI's 3D Rage Pro. Industry analysts placed serious doubts on ARK's ability to compete in the 3D marketplace, as those aforementioned chips were rapidly aging at the time of the Cougar 3D's announcement; in addition, the i740 was a commercial flop, with Intel forced to dump them on the market at steep markdowns. ARK Logic's website went dark in September 2002. Compare with next available archived snapshot. Despite the company's GPUs languishing in obscurity, X.Org Foundation still maintains 2D graphics drivers for ARK GPUs for

X.Org Server X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System (X11) display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation. Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which ...

References

External links

* {{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/19970530024049/arklogic.com, date=May 30, 1997, title=Official website 1993 establishments in California 2002 disestablishments in California American companies established in 1993 American companies disestablished in 2002 Computer companies established in 1993 Computer companies disestablished in 2002 Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer companies based in California Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States Fabless semiconductor companies Graphics hardware companies