By William Fellows
A new generation of graphics hardware accelerators now under development at Hewlett-Packard Co will provide support for the high-end Fahrenheit graphics environment now the sole responsibility of Microsoft Corp. The accelerators are expected to supercede the current high-end of HP’s Visualize fx hardware accelerators next year.
Fahrenheit has changed since Silicon Graphics Inc and Hewlett- Packard Co joined Microsoft to define a radical new 3D graphics library supporting but the project is still alive and kicking. First HP handed Microsoft the code to its DirectModel 3D rendering technology. More recently SGI, with its myriad problems, pulled out of the Fahrenheit project, which also supports SGI’s industry-standard OpenGL graphics library.
Earlier this year Microsoft said it would be supporting Fahrenheit on a range of operating systems including Linux to increase its attractive. Fahrenheit was regarded as a private club because of its lack of support for third party operating systems; NT, Irix and HP-UX were the only ones on the original running card.
HP says it is likely to end up treating Fahrenheit as another graphics API, albeit a high-end environment, alongside OpenGL and Microsoft’s DirectX.
There are specific extensions being integrated into Fahrenheit that will enable companies to develop hardware accelerators specifically to improve performance of programs incorporating the APIs.
