A marriage of PC and workstation technologies

Author

Rosen, B.

Author_Institution

Mars Microsyst. Inc., PA, USA

fYear

1991

fDate

Feb. 25 1991-March 1 1991

Firstpage

34

Lastpage

36

Abstract

A system that is a hybrid of a PC and a workstation is described. It gives users a superset of both systems without loss of the compatibility, performance, or capability of existing PC systems. The system consists of a SPARC-based workstation with an optional 80386-based DOS coprocessor module. The RISC motherboard and the DOS module have their own cache, memory, and graphics subsystems, which operate independently. The two video streams are mixed so that the DOS VGA display appears as a window in the UNIX screen. The workstation/PC hybrid is based on a 16-b ISA bus, so that hardware as well as software compatibility, is maintained.<>

Keywords

microcomputers; workstations; 16-b ISA bus; 80386-based DOS coprocessor module; PC; SPARC-based workstation; UNIX screen; cache; graphics subsystems; memory; performance; personal computers; software compatibility; workstation technologies; Coprocessors; Displays; Graphics; Hardware; Instruction sets; Performance loss; Reduced instruction set computing; Software maintenance; Streaming media; Workstations;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Compcon Spring '91. Digest of Papers

Conference_Location

San Francisco, CA, USA

Print_ISBN

0-8186-2134-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CMPCON.1991.128779

Filename

128779