Appian Technology Inc has introduced its Rendition III Intelligent Graphics Controller, said to deliver 256 colours with a system performance increase of five times previous generation controllers: it uses the same graphics technology that Appian supplies Digital Equipment Corp for the DECpc 433 Workstation and features Texas Instruments Inc’s TMS 34020 graphics system processor which off-graphics processing from the CPU to the controller; the TMS34020 is a full 32-bit microprocessor with a 512 byte on-chip instruction cache; Appian’s software drivers, in combination with the TMS34020, provide high speed workstation graphics performance to computer aided design and business applications; it supports a range of multi-frequency monitors at resolutions up to 1,280 by 1,024 non-interlaced, with either 16 or 256 colour display from a palette of 16.7m colours; fully configured the Rendition III has 2Mb video RAM and 4Mb RAM; single monitor support is provided via VGA pass-through mode or Appian’s VGA daughterboard; Rendition III is available now at an entry-level $2,400.
