Platform Notes: SPARCstation 10SX and SPARCstation 20 System Configuration Guide

Introduction

One of the performance enhancements for SX applications is the availability of physically contiguous DRAM. Physically contiguous DRAM for SX will be referred to in this document as SXDRAM. This document describes:

SX provides acceleration of the graphics and imaging segments of applications that run on a SPARCstation 10SX or SPARCstation 20 workstation. Acceleration can be used for a wide range of pixel operations, including 2D and 3D graphics rendering, multimedia, and image processing.

The SX accelerator, built into the SMC, can directly accelerate operations on both the system main memory (DRAM) and the video memory (VRAM). The SMC is comprised of:

  1. An error-correcting code memory controller which interfaces with both the system main memory (DRAM) and the video memory (VRAM; the frame buffer) to the system memory bus.

  2. The SX imaging and graphics accelerator.