A 2.5 GFLOPS 6.5 million polygons per second 4-way VLIW geometry processor with SIMD instructions and a software bypass mechanism

A 4-way VLIW geometry processor runs at 312 MHz and contains a PCI/AGP bus bridge in a three-layer-metal CMOS process with 0.21 /spl mu/m design rules at 2.5 V. It features: (1) VLIW and SIMD instruction sets, (2) a software bypass mechanism, (3) special condition-code registers and branch condition generator for clipping, and (4) automatic clock delay tuning. The result is performance of 2.5 GFLOPS and 6.5 Mpolygons/s in a 3D geometry processor. This chip can be added to conventional graphics systems without requiring additional LSIs.