Tadpole Technology Inc, the Waltham, Massachusetts arm of the Cambridge, UK-based company, has announced a VME board set for Motorola’s 88000 RISC architecture, which it claims will run at up to 220 MIPS, and has implemented a multiprocessor version of Unix to run on it. TP-IX/88K is a distributed, multi-threaded version of Unix System V.3.2 specifically designed for the TP881V board set, but will also run on other 88000 boards. The software includes TP-CDS/88K, a C compiler capable of running native or cross compiler codes for generating Unix or stand-alone applications. Tadpole says that it will evolve to support the forthcoming V.4 release of Unix, and that other ersions for Intel 80860 and Motorola 68040 architectures are under development, to be released mid-1990. Available from November, TP-IX/88K comes with TCP/IP, Network File System and Berkeley’s 4.3 BSD networking interface. The TP881V board set has up to 128Mb of memory, dual SCSI interface, four RS232 lines and Ethernet support. On top of all this the company also has a new graphics controller – the TP-AGC – which operates with a host CPU. It is a VME colour or monochrome graphics frame buff er implemented on a custom silicon device known as the TS20020 – basically a hardware windowing engine providing hardware graphics and text window management on a single chip. The TP-AGC uses four of the things and provides simultane ous movement of 32 single plane, or for four windows. It comes with 4Mb of video RAM, has a display resolution of 1,600 by 1,200 pixels and is supported by the X Window System and TP-IX.
