The I.M.O.G.E.N.E. Machine: Some Hardware Elements

Abstract

The goal of the I.M.O.G.E.N.E. project is to define a real time graphics system. We focus on true real time display, images being computed at frame rate, i.e 50 (or 60) times a second. The I.M.O.G.E.N.E. machine uses no frame buffer. We use a massive object parallelism; the graphics module is made of a large number of object-processors, each one handling one graphics primitive at pixel rate in rasterscan order. Shading computations are made in a deferred shading processor using Phong's method. After a brief presentation of Object-Oriented Architectures, we present new details about the hardware implementation of our Object Processors, and describe for the first time the shading processor.