Two widely-different architectural approaches to computer image generation

A description is given of the computer graphics aspects of two architectures designed for imaging and graphics. The two systems use parallel and pipelined architectures for high-performance graphics operations. UWGPSP3 uses only commercially available off-the-shelf chips, and consists of a TM34020 graphics system processor and four TMS34082 floating point coprocessors that can be configured into pipelined or SIMD modes depending on the algorithm. UWGSP4 uses dedicated ASIC chips for higher performance, and consists of two main computational parts: a parallel vector processor with 16 vector processing units, used mainly for image processing, and a graphics subsystem which utilizes a parallel pipelined architecture for image synthesis