The Graphics Chip Chronicles

Jon Peddie has put together short overviews of graphics chips that have made a major impact over the years. It is a fun look back at how we got to where GPGPUs are the norm.
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This article series is in the Electronic History and System Design topics within our Series Library

Jon Peddie has put together short overviews of graphics chips that have made a major impact over the years. It is a fun look back at how we got to where GPGPUs are the norm.

Volume 1 (Download the eBook)

  1. NEC µPD7220 Graphics Display Controller: The first graphics processor chip
  2. EGA to VGA: The initiation of bit-mapped graphics and the chip clone wars
  3. Intel’s 82786 Intel’s First Discrete Graphics Coprocessor
  4. Texas Instruments TMS34010 and VRAM
  5. IBM's PGC and 8514/A
  6. IBM's VGA

Volume 2 (Download the eBook)

  1. IBM's XGA
  2. Number Nine's Imagine 128
  3. Nvidia's Riva 128
  4. 3Dfx's Voodoo

Volume 3 (Download the eBook)

  1. Microsoft's Talisman: The Graphics Chip That Never Was
  2. Artist Graphics GPX: Too Little Too Late
  3. Matrox MGA: The Longest-Produced Graphics Chip Ever
  4. AT&T Truevision’s Targa Set Standards Still Used Today

Volume 4 (Download the eBook)

  1. Intel i740: Big Investments, Major Embarrassments
  2. HP’s Artist Chip: Highly-Integrated With The System in Mind
  3. The History of the Integrated Graphics Controller
  4. Nintendo 64: Breakthrough Design, Genuine Disruption

Volume 5 (Download the eBook)

  1. Multi GPUs: A Story of Promise and Potential Failure
  2. S3 ViRGE: Trying for Virtual Reality Too Early
  3. ATI 3D Rage: One of the First "Free-D" Chips
  4. Geometry Engine: The Legendary Chip That Launched SGI

Volume 6 (Download the eBook)

  1. 3DLabs: From Glint to Permedia
  2. Yamaha's YGY611: A Pioneer in 3D Graphics
  3. Nvidia’s Quadratic Processor: The NV1
  4. Nvidia's GeForce 256: The First Fully-Integrated GPU

Volume 7 (Download the eBook)

  1. ATI’s Radeon 8500: First GPU With Hardware Tessellation
  2. Stellar's Short-Lived Run in 3D Graphics Processors
  3. Alphamosaic to Pi to Doom via Broadcom
  4. Tseng ET4000: Early Winner Falls Short on 3D

Volume 8

  1. NCR 7300: Ahead of Its Time, Behind on Customers
  2. Imagination’s Kyro: Nearly the World’s First GPU?
  3. Electronics History: AMD’s Unified Shader GPU
  4. Electronics History: NVIDIA’s Pascal Architecture and the GTX 1080