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ATI Mach
The ATI Mach line was a series of 2D graphics accelerators for personal computers developed by ATI Technologies. It became an extension (and eventual successor) to the ATI Wonder series of cards. The first chip in the series was the ATI Mach8. It was essentially a clone of the IBM 8514/A with a few notable extensions such as Crystal fonts. Being one of the first graphics accelerator chips on the market, the Mach8 did not have an integrated VGA core. In order to use the first Mach8 coprocessor cards, a separate VGA card was required. This increased the cost of ownership as one had to purchase two rather than one expansion card for graphics. A temporary solution was presented with the ATI Graphics Ultra/Vantage cards, which combined an ATI 8514 Ultra and VGA Wonder+ into a single card (though using discrete ICs). The Mach32 chip was the follow-up to the Mach8, which finally featured an integrated VGA core, true colour support and a 64-bit datapath to internal memory. Models Mac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ATI Wonder Series
The ATI Wonder is a series of video cards for the IBM Personal Computer and IBM PC compatible, compatibles, introduced by ATI Technologies in the mid to late 1980s. These cards were unique at the time as they offered the end user a considerable amount of value by combining support for multiple graphics standards (and monitors) into a single card. The ''VGA Wonder'' series added additional value with the inclusion of a Bus mouse, bus mouse port, which normally required the installation of a dedicated Microsoft Mouse adapter. The ''VGA Wonder'' series later merged with the ATI Mach series of cards in 1990. The ''ATI Graphics Ultra'' (Video random-access memory, VRAM) and ''ATI Graphics Vantage'' (Dynamic random-access memory, DRAM) cards both featured independent ''VGA Wonder'' Application-specific integrated circuit, ASICs in addition to their ''Mach8'' IBM 8514, 8514 compatible graphics processing unit, graphics processor. The ''Graphics Ultra'' was later renamed the ''VGA Wonder GT ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VESA BIOS Extensions
VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) is a VESA standard, currently at version 3, that defines the interface that can be used by software to access compliant video boards at high resolutions and bit depths. This is opposed to the "traditional" INT 10h BIOS calls, which are limited to resolutions of 640×480 pixels with 16 colour (4-bit) depth or less. VBE is made available through the video card's BIOS, which installs some interrupt vectors that point to itself during boot up. Most newer cards implement the more capable VBE 3.0 standard. Older versions of VBE provide only a real mode interface, which cannot be used without a significant performance penalty from within protected mode operating systems. Consequently, the VBE standard has almost never been used for writing a video card's drivers; each vendor has thus had to invent a proprietary protocol for communicating with its own video card. Despite this, it is common that a driver thunk out to the real mode interrupt in order to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dynamic Random-access Memory
Dynamics (from Greek language, Greek δυναμικός ''dynamikos'' "powerful", from δύναμις ''dynamis'' "power (other), power") or dynamic may refer to: Physics and engineering * Dynamics (mechanics), the study of forces and their effect on motion Brands and enterprises * Dynamic (record label), an Italian record label in Genoa Mathematics * Dynamical system, a concept describing a point's time dependency ** Topological dynamics, the study of dynamical systems from the viewpoint of general topology * Symbolic dynamics, a method to model dynamical systems Social science * Group dynamics, the study of social group processes especially * Population dynamics, in life sciences, the changes in the composition of a population * Psychodynamics, the study of psychological forces driving human behavior * Social dynamics, the ability of a society to react to changes * Spiral Dynamics, a social development theory Other uses * Dynamics (music), the softness or loudn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TV Tuner Card
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 video recorder (DVR) does. The interfaces for TV tuner cards are most commonly either PCI bus expansion card or the newer PCI Express (PCIe) bus for many modern cards, but PCMCIA, ExpressCard, or USB devices also exist. In addition, some video cards double as TV tuners, notably the ATI All-In-Wonder series. The card contains a tuner and an analog-to-digital converter (collectively known as the analog front end) along with demodulation and interface logic. Some lower-end cards lack an onboard processor and, like a Winmodem, rely on the system's CPU for demodulation. Types There are many types of tuner cards. Analog tuners Analog television cards output a raw video stream, suitable for real-time viewing but ideally requiring some ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 video cards to store the color palette and to generate the analog signals (usually a voltage amplitude) to drive a color monitor. The logical color number from the display memory is fed into the address inputs of the SRAM to select a palette entry to appear on the data output of the SRAM. This entry is composed of three separate values corresponding to the three components (red, green, and blue) of the desired physical color. Each component value is fed to a separate DAC, whose analog output goes to the monitor, and ultimately to one of its three electron guns (or equivalent in non- CRT displays). RAMDACs became obsolete as DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and other digital interface technology became mainstream, which transfer video data digitally ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Micro Channel Architecture
Micro Channel architecture, or the Micro Channel bus, is a proprietary hardware, proprietary 16-bit computing, 16- or 32-bit computing, 32-bit parallel communication, parallel computer bus (computing), bus publicly introduced by IBM in 1987 which was used on IBM PS/2, PS/2 and other computers until the mid-1990s. Its name is commonly abbreviated as "MCA", although not by IBM. In IBM products, it superseded the Industry Standard Architecture, ISA bus and was itself subsequently superseded by the Peripheral Component Interconnect, PCI bus architecture. Background The development of Micro Channel was driven by both technical and business pressures. Technology The IBM AT bus, which later became known as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus, had a number of technical design limitations, including: * A slow bus speed. * A limited number of interrupts, fixed in hardware. * A limited number of I/O device addresses, also fixed in hardware. * Hardwired and complex configur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 that is independent of any given processor's native bus. Devices connected to the PCI bus appear to a bus master to be connected directly to its own bus and are assigned addresses in the processor's address space. It is a parallel bus, synchronous to a single bus clock. Attached devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard (called a ''planar device'' in the PCI specification) or an expansion card that fits into a slot. The PCI Local Bus was first implemented in IBM PC compatibles, where it displaced the combination of several slow Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) slots and one fast VESA Local Bus (VLB) slot as the bus configuration. It has subsequently been adopted for other computer types ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 Bus worked alongside the then-dominant ISA bus to provide a standardized high-speed conduit intended primarily to accelerate video (graphics) operations. VLB provides a standardized fast path that add-in (video) card makers could tap for greatly accelerated memory-mapped I/O and DMA, while still using the familiar ISA bus to handle basic device duties such as interrupts and port-mapped I/O. Some high-end 386DX motherboards also had a VL-Bus slot. Historical overview In the early 1990s, the I/O bandwidth of the prevailing ISA bus, 8.33 MB/s for standard 16 bit 8.33 MHz slots, had become a critical bottleneck to PC video and graphics performance. The need for faster graphics was driven by increased adoption of graphical user interf ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
