Bops discloses new cores targeted at improving 3D graphics and visual realism

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Palo Alto, California, March 8, 2000- BOPS, Inc., a leading programmable DSP core provider, is disclosing its MO-RAY(tm) family of scalable floating-point array processor cores at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose (March 8 through March 11, 2000). Its MO-RAY(tm) family extends the 3D Graphics performance of the BOPS ManArray(tm) architecture. At GDC, BOPS will also disclose information about its BOPS Software Development Kit (SDK) used to develop applications based on the new cores.
The new MO-RAY cores accelerate a wide range of geometry processing functions such as curved-surface tessellation and transform and lighting. Their fully programmable architecture accelerates rendering and animation algorithms to allow for more complicated graphics.
BOPS MO-RAY cores target semiconductor companies who are developing 3D graphics controllers for PCs, workstations and game consoles.
Ivan Greenberg, Director of Marketing, Multimedia Segment at BOPS, noted, " Unlike other programmable architectures, our BOPS2040DF MO-RAY core will offer unprecedented programmable curved surface tessellation and transform and light performance with negligible impact on die size."
BOPS SDK for MO-RAY provides the tools and software libraries necessary to develop reusable, high-performance 3D graphics geometry algorithms for runtime execution using BOPS MO-RAY cores. The BOPS2040DF core with its SDK enables semiconductor and OEM companies to increase their 3D graphics performance and differentiate their products.

More about the MO-RAY family of floating point cores
The BOPS MO-RAY family of floating point cores have been optimized for advanced geometry processing through the addition of dual issue floating point multiply and add capability. This single architectural addition provides a 2X improvement in geometry performance with a negligible increase in die size when compared to BOPS standard family of cores. The first instance of the MO-RAY family, BOPS2040DF, transforms 50M triangles per second at 200MHz clock while consuming only 600K logic gates.
The BOPS SDK for MO-RAY cores extends the capabilities of BOPS ManArray SDK by providing optimized geometry libraries and assembly-level optimization support for the MO-RAY core family.

What BOPS partners say
Lincoln Wallen, CTO, MathEngine (Oxford, UK), said, "Our MathEngine physics capabilities and BOPS core technology go well together for improving 3D applications. They address the next frontier after geometry processing and will improve animation and character behavior."
"We find BOPS' SDK to be a very powerful tool for creating optimized code and for optimizing parallel instructions and deriving cycle counts. This made our process of OpenGL geometry engine development much quicker than expected," stated, Greg Passmore, CTO of 3-D Pipeline (San Diego, CA).

More about BOPS cores
BOPS provides DSP intellectual property in the form of software ("soft" or synthesizable) macros and offers a wide range of "soft" cores to choose from. All are instruction set compatible and use the same hardware and software development tools.

BOPS'SDK offers an integrated development environment including a System Simulator; Instruction Set Simulator (ISS); Compiler for MATLAB and Vector Library; GNU-C compiler, assembler, linker and loader; VLIW packer; Register Allocator; DSP libraries and BOPS ManArray technical information and coding examples.

Availability
The BOPS SDK for MO-RAY works with PC and UNIX operating systems and will ship in June.
The BOPS MO-RAY 2040DF core will also be available in synthesizable (or Register-Transfer Level) form in June 2000. BOPS MO-RAY 2040DF will be delivered with an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) compliance suite, a test vector suite and documentation.
 

About BOPS, Inc.
BOPS, Inc. is a Palo Alto, California based company that develops and licenses the highest-performance, scalable and reusable DSP cores and world-class compiler and software tool products targeted for high-volume, SOC- based applications for the Internet, multimedia and wireless communications markets. The ManArray DSP core product family accelerates a SOC manufacturers' time from product concept to high-volume shipment. The ManArray technology has been designed to integrate with MIPS and ARM(tm) processor-based SOCs.

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BOPS is a registered trademark of BOPS, Inc. and ManArray is a trademark of BOPS, Inc.
MathEngine is a trademark of MathEngine PLC.
MATLAB is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.
OpenGL is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc.
All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

Reader Service Contact
BOPS, Inc., 101 University Avenue, Suite 410, Palo Alto, CA. 94301
Attention: Ivan Greenberg, 650 330 8404, ivan@bops.com

Acronyms : BOPS Billions of Operations Per Second, DSP Digital Signal Processing, ISA Instruction Set Architecture, ISS Instruction Set Simulator, RTL Register-Transfer Level, SDK Software Development Kit, SOC Systems-on-a-chip, VLIW Very Long Instruction Word