S3 Inc, Santa Clara, California has a new chip designed to accelerate graphical user interface operations under Microsoft Windows, OS/2 Presentation Manager and X Window: the 86C911 chip, intended to be designed onto motherboards or graphics add-in boards, speeds graphical interfaces by performing in hardware many of the basic drawing functions that must otherwise be executed by the CPU; it is hard-wired to perform a limited set of functions – graphics primitives – quickly and inexpensively, supporting the graphics primitives needed for all the major functions – BitBlts – moving and resizing windows, pop-up menus, and control panels, image transfers, area fills, raster operations, fonts, line drawing, colour expansion, and cursor control; it needs a special graphics driver, and these have so far been developed for the major graphical user interfaces and for some MS-DOS applications such as AutoCAD, VersaCAD, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Word, and Ventura Publisher; it is shipping now at $75 in OEM volume.
