Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Identifying an unknown Pixar card with Transputers on it?

atomicthumbs
Who joined June 10, 2015, 1:34 p.m.
Wrote the following at June 10, 2015, 1:40 p.m...
Howdy y'all.

I work at an e-waste recycling center, and this thing came in. I don't know if it came with anything else, but I found it in our circuit boards bin and saved it.

It says Pixar V1A on the left, R/AT on the right, BLANK 120134, and ASSY 710134. It's got a pair of Inmos C08 transputers, various handwritten labels (with such enlightening names as "pfile-10"), and it says 03-89 on the rear side mask.

click for full size pics:
Image

Image

Anyone have any clues?
R-ten-K avatar
R-ten-K
From Nor Cal
Who joined Nov. 15, 2004, 10:36 p.m.
Wrote the following at June 10, 2015, 6:44 p.m...
That's a Pixar "Render Accelerator" board. The "creative" name says exactly what the board does; it uses the transputers to accelerate renderman in HW. You could scale these boards in a single host system, by linking up a bunch of them using the transputer links, to cut down rendering time significantly.

Nice save, pixar never really got any traction with their HW products, so these things ought to be rarer than hen's teeth.

The only references to it I know of are from some academic papers; https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/ ... thrift.pdf
"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"
GL1zdA avatar
GL1zdA
Donor
From Warsaw, PL
Who joined Dec. 31, 2009, 3:18 p.m.
Wrote the following at June 12, 2015, 7:49 a.m...
Here's an InfoWorld article mentioning the Render Accelerator: https://books.google.pl/books?id=vDAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT5
:PI: :Indigo: :Indigo: :Indigo: :Indy: :Indy: :Indigo2: :Indigo2IMP: :Octane: :Fuel: :540:
atomicthumbs
Who joined June 10, 2015, 1:34 p.m.
Wrote the following at June 13, 2015, 7:36 p.m...
I just wish I'd caught it before someone put a dent in one of the Transputers. :(