Bitboys Oy, a Finnish company specializing in 3D graphics processor cores and algorithms, has launched the Glaze3D product family of graphics accelerator architectures using embedded DRAM, aimed at games vendors. The Glaze3D 1200 single chip and 2400 two-chip set are claimed to be the first to use embedded DRAM, which avoids the bottlenecks typically caused by external memory bandwidth restrictions, practically limited to 128-bits. With embedded DRAM the memory bus is internal and can be as wide as needed.
The Glaze3D 1200 chip has 73 Mbits of embedded framebuffer memory with a 512-bit interface, and a quad-pixel pipelined rendering core clocked at 150MHz. Bitboys says it can generate 1200m texels per second, four times as much as current 3D graphics accelerator chips. The chip is compatible with PC 99, Direct X 7.0, OpenGL 1.2 and Windows 2000. Bitboys also has a four processor combination under development. The first chips, manufactured by Infineon Technologies AG (formerly Siemens Semiconductor Group) in .20 micron technology, should become available in the first quarter of next year.
