Back in September of 1999, we had our first interview with the Finnish company, Bitboys Oy. At that time, they made clear their intention to bring their Glaze3D graphics accelerator to market in Q2 2000.
Sporting 9MB of embedded DRAM connected to the Glaze3D processor core by a 512-bit memory bus in addition to a 128-bit external SDRAM powered memory bus, the 150MHz chip boasts up to 12GB/second of memory bandwidth.
With claimed fill-rates of 1200 million pixels/second with the Glaze3D 2400 and 600 million pixels/second with the Glaze3D 1200, Bitboys gave us visions of high-resolution, environment bump mapped, full scene anti-aliased, 32-bit sugarplums dancing in our heads.
Needless to say, we still have questions. This time around, we've taken a close look at the Glaze3D architecture and asked about mostly technical issues.
Sharky Extreme: What is your name and position with Bitboys Oy?
Shane Long: Thank you for your interest in Bitboys. There have been a large number of people supporting us and encouraging us over the last year to execute on our innovative architecture. The team sincerely appreciates this showing of faith. We have made the commitments and outlined an architecture that can change 3D graphics. We will now deliver. It is an extremely exciting time for us, and we believe in the very near future will be for the rest of the industry as well.
Shane Long, President and CEO of Bitboys.
SE: Please give a short history of Bitboys Oy?
SL: The company has a strong history in 3D graphics dating back to 1991 when they were developing some of the fastest software 3D engines around. The team begin to recognize the need for the next level of graphics accelerators in the area of 3D due to this early work. They had a very good understanding of the 3D pipeline and set to design one of the industries first 3D accelerators. This design, which began in late 1993, included such features as dual texturing, environmental bump mapping, perspective correct color interpolation and believe it or not even a small programmable geometry engine. All features that were well ahead of what other solutions were offering. This product was licensed to Tritech Microelectronics in Singapore. Tritech unfortunately could not complete the project and hence a great deal of product research and development went unrealized by the market.
The team began a totally new design in early 1998, which is now known as the Glaze3D project. It is important to mention that Glaze is a project name. We will be introducing the chipset next month with final specifications under its own marketing name.