This Week, Industry Snapshot Looks at
Multimedia Companies

A sample of the full length subscription product is available for download, as well as details surounding its genesis. To the right subscribers and non-subscribers alike are invited to peruse the companies that are featured in this week's Industry Snapshot. In addition, we urge existing subscribers to take advantage of "Subscribers Online," it's chock full of helpful research and follow-up information on the industries and companies featured in previous Snapshots.

Creative Technology Ltd.

Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc.

Intergraph Corporation

Number Nine Visual Technology

STB Systems, Inc.

Every week we will offer up a taste of what is available to Industry Snapshot subscribers by providing a short summation of the industry and the companies that appear in the most curent issue.

This Weeks Industry Snapshot

The advent of the graphical user interface (GUI) as a standard element of operating environments ushered in one the first great shifts in the computer hardware industry. The typical PC of the late 1980s and early 1990s was ill-equipped to handle the demands of an OS that ran in graphics mode 95% of the time. The need for improved graphics performance on the PC set the market for graphics chips, add-in boards and high-speed data buses on fire. These developments gave rise to entirely new dialects of technical jargon, that presently deserve some explanation.

A graphics subsystem consists primarily of an accelerator chip, memory chips, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and software drivers and utilities. The accelerator chip is the graphics engine that enhances speed, image clarity and color by performing functions that would otherwise be executed by the Central Processing Unit (CPU). Advanced graphics systems usually have this powerful auxiliary microprocessor at their core, aiding the system processor in making images run faster with richer features. Memory chips, which are available in DRAM, SRAM and higher performance VRAM and WRAM configurations are used in order to temporarily store graphics information for display. The actual memory array in which color information is stored is known as "frame buffer memory." The DAC converts data from the digital format, in which it is typically stored in the graphics memory, to the analog format required by the display monitor. Software drivers are used to "interface" the accelerator chip with the CPU, as well as optimize the overall performance of the subsystem. Software utilities, which serve to increase the number and variety of display features, are added to subsystems in order to boost functionality.

Most graphics subsystems in the "old days" used an 8-bit accelerator, had only 256K of frame buffer memory and were limited to screen resolutions of 640x480 and 16 colors. In the interim, the pace of change in accelerators has, well...accelerated, largely through increases in controller bit rates, greater processor speeds, and wider bus interfaces (information must run through a narrow pipe called the system PCI bus which connects the microprocessor with the input/output peripherals). Today, standard accelerators have increased from 8-bit to 64-bit architectures and the acceleration/memory interface has gone from 8-bits to a hum drum 32 bits (some have 128 bit interfaces). In addition, frame buffer size has improved up to 4MB, and the paltry 16 colors of yesteryear have increased to 16.8 million at standard resolutions of 1024x768. What does all this mean? Sadly for readers who have endured the last two paragraphs, nothing. All these advancements have taken place within the flat arena of two dimensions. 3D technology is here, and its three distinguishing stages, tessellation, geometry and rendering require up to 40 times more computing power than 2D graphics. In fact a "full-function" rendering stage may require as many as 5 billion operations per second in order to achieve realistic animation. This performance rate is roughly 20 times that of Intel's high-end microprocessor, the Pentium Pro. Clearly, this is too much work for any desktop PC's central processor, the market for graphics chips and add-in boards is about to be set ablaze...again.

(c) Copyright 1997, The Motley Fool. All rights reserved. This material is for personal use only. Republication and redissemination, including posting to news groups, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of The Motley Fool.