Lesson plan
Geometry Engine
The Geometry Engine is an early very large scale integrated circuit (VLSI) vector processor designed for 3D computer graphics by Jim Clark and Marc Hannah at Stanford University under ARPA contract. The Geometry Engine was initially implemented as a 40-pin chip, capable of multiplying two four-element vectors every 15 microseconds; one vector represented the coordinates of a vertex in 3D space while the other was typically a portion of a transformation matrix. Clark anticipated that a pipeline of twelve Geometry Engines would comprise a Geometry System "to accomplish 4 × 4 matrix multiplications; line, character, and polygon clipping; and scaling of the clipped results to display device coordinates". This ASIC chip was first demonstrated in 1981. This processor is the forerunner of modern tensor processors marketed for graphics and artificial intelligence (AI). The Geometry Engine was adopted commercially in Silicon Graphics computer workstations for many years. Silicon Graphics's first product, shipped in November 1983, was the IRIS 1000, a terminal with hardware-accelerated 3D graphics based on the Geometry Engine. It was capable of approximately 6 million operations per second.
Article summary
The Geometry Engine is an early very large scale integrated circuit (VLSI) vector processor designed for 3D computer graphics by Jim Clark and Marc Hannah at Stanford University under ARPA contract. The Geometry Engine was initially implemented as a 40-pin chip, capable of multiplying two four-element vectors every 15 microseconds; one vector represented the coordinates of a vertex in 3D space while the other was typically a portion of a transformation matrix. Clark anticipated that a pipeline of twelve Geometry Engines would comprise a Geometry System "to accomplish 4 × 4 matrix multiplications; line, character, and polygon clipping; and scaling of the clipped results to display device coordinates". This ASIC chip was first demonstrated in 1981. This processor is the forerunner of modern tensor processors marketed for graphics and artificial intelligence (AI). The Geometry Engine was adopted commercially in Silicon Graphics computer workstations for many years. Silicon Graphics's first product, shipped in November 1983, was the IRIS 1000, a terminal with hardware-accelerated 3D graphics based on the Geometry Engine. It was capable of approximately 6 million operations per second.
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.