Chips & Technologies also announced a programmable software accelerator chipset for AT and EISA bus standards, which is designed to provide a three-to-ten-fold performance improvement in complex graphics functions for the end user. At the heart of the Programmable Universal Micro Accelerator (PUMA) Chipset is the 50MHz 94C2001 PUMA-P chip. The chipset functions like a co-processor: the microprocessor offloads to PUMA certain compute intensive software routines, PUMA then sends the completed calculation to video memory. The chipset will be available for sampling in February and in production quantities in April – pricing is $90 in volume quantities.
