PixelFusion Ltd will use Rambus Inc memory chips with its upcoming Fuzion 150 board, claiming that only the Intel Corp-backed DRAM technology has the performance needed for its much-vaunted Windows NT graphics chip. The Bristol, UK-based company will use four RIMMS in conjunction with the Fuzion chip, which has Rambus memory controllers embedded in the silicon, claiming that this combination results in a throughput of 6.4Gb per second between the chip and the local memory.
We looked at all other types of memory out there, Robert Pearson, PixelFusion’s VP of marketing said, but none of them gave the kind of performance characteristics we needed. The company plans to use either 711MHz or 800MHz Rambus chips on its boards. However, Pearson admitted that he didn’t know about delays around the arrival of the new memory technology. The company has not yet reached the stage where it needs the Rambus chips. Pearson said that PixelFusion was confident that the chips would be available when the company needed the silicon.
PixelFusion has been talking up its chip design since it was spun out of UK virtual reality specialist Division Group Ltd in January 1998. The company claims that its chip will offer dramatically more computing power than any other graphics chip on the market, scaling to 3Gflops. This means that the chip has a peak rate of over 150 million transformations per second or 50 million rendered polygons per second. Pearson said that PixelFusion is partnering with a major board integrator to produce the Fuzion 150, but declined to give names. The company is targeting the major NT workstation manufacturers with the new board, including Hewlett-Packard Co, SGI and Sun Microsystems Inc. Fuzion 150 is expected to be available early in 2000.
