GD80—A multi-microprocessor architecture for computer graphics

Abstract

GD80 is a modular family of refresh, vector-type graphic displays. Five microprocessors for different tasks communicate on two separate busses using interprocessors interrupts, memory windows and shared memory with hardware supported mutual exclusion. Two identical 8 bit microprocessors are dedicated for peripheral handling and communication, two 16 bit microprogrammable bit-slice processors for picture generation and display list processing, and a 48 bit one for fast floating point arithmetic calculations and matrix-vector transformations. This paper describes the main building blocks, the multiprocessing methods and some typical configurations built using the modules.