Cirrus Logic

Cirrus Logic is a fabless semiconductor manufacturer. The company was founded in 1981 as Patil Systems, Inc. Suhas Patil of Salt Lake City / Utah. It was renamed Cirrus Logic, as the company headquarters was moved to Silicon Valley in 1984. The current headquarters is located in Austin / Texas.

Currently, the product line consists mainly of audio DSPs. Cirrus Logic has in the past but also produces modem chip, controller chips for optical drives, sound chips for sound cards and primarily graphics chips.

History

In the early 1990s, Cirrus Logic has been a leading supplier of low-cost PC graphics chips. Cirrus ' Windows accelerator were among the fastest of the low-end market segment and were faster than the VGA chip the competition (such as Oak Technology, Trident Microsystems and Paradise Western Digital). Has supported the Cirrus GD- 5422 (1992) hardware acceleration both in 256 colors as well as in high-color display mode ( 65536 colors), making it one of the best SVGA controller that supported both display modes.

The mid-1990s, when the industry transition to the PCI bus, Cirrus was obtained from S3 and Trident Microsystems. When the announced sale date of the DG - 5470 Mondello could not be met, fell Cirrus ' reputation. Mondello would have been the first 3D graphics accelerator from Cirrus.

Later, the company offered to the VGA controller of the Voodoo Rush 3D graphics accelerator. The Voodoo Rush card united two separate graphics controller chips for legacy VGA ( 2D ) and 3D functionality. Both chips shared the same framebuffer memory. However, was a disappointment, the Voodoo Rush in marketing and technical. The last series of the graphics chip company, called GD- 546x Laguna, RDRAM used instead of conventional SDRAM. The capabilities of the Perspective Texture Mapping, Bilinear filtering, single-pass Lightning, Gouraud Shading and alpha blending were both slow and implemented incompletely.

Graphics chips

Desktop

  • CL- GD5410 - AKA: Cyrix Xpress Graphics (integrated in Cyrix CX86, AKA: MediaGX CPU) 2112 kb memory
  • CL- GD5420 - ISA SVGA chipset, high - integrated ( RAMDAC PLL), 1 MB of memory
  • CL- GD5422 - Enhanced version of the 5420 (32-bit internal memory interface, hardware BitBLT )
  • CL- GD5424 - VLB version of the 5422, but similar to the 5426 in some aspects
  • CL- GD5428 - Enhanced version of 5426
  • CL- GD5429 - Enhanced version of 5428; officially supports higher clock rate of memory and has memory-mapped I / O
  • CL- GD5430 - Similar to 5429, but with 543x core (32 bit Host Interface)
  • CL- GD5434 - Chip of the Alpine family with 64 bit internal memory interface. Supports 64 -bit mode, equipped only provided with 2 Mbyte memory. Last VLB bus chip
  • CL- GD5436 - High - optimized 5434
  • CL- GD5440 - Similar to the 5430 has an additional video accelerator
  • CL- GD54M40 lowcost version of the 5440 in the 160 pin package
  • CL- GD5446 - Another member of the Alpine family of 2D accelerators; 5436 extended to video accelerator, EDO RAM, the video front-end chip PX4072 is a umgelabelter VPX3216 ITT
  • CL- GD546X - The Laguna Visual Media family of 3D accelerators ( 5464 = PCI, AGP = 5465 ). These chips use RDRAM memory. The 5462 is a 2D accelerator including a BitBLT Engine, video windows and 64x64 hardware cursor
  • CL- GD5480 - used SGRAM, max 4MB, 64 -bit wide, Direct 3D

Notebook

  • CL-GD6410/6420/6440 - Used in some notebooks, similar to older Cirrus chipsets ( 5410/AVGA2 )
  • CL-GD6205/6215/6225/6235 - Compatible with the 5420
  • CL-GD7541/7542/7543/7548 - Compatible with the 5427/3x
Types of business entity Austin (Texas) Fabless manufacturing S3 Graphics
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