Famous graphics chips: HP’s Artist Graphics

  In 1993, facing heavy competition from Sun, HP set the design goal for its new 32-bit HP 9000/712 workstation to reach performance levels of 1992-era workstations and servers at a fraction of their fabrication costs. Their target was the earlier generation HP 9000/735. To accomplish that HP employed VLSI technologies for the processor components, which were state of the art at the time. What they came up with was the heart of the system: the famous PA-RISC CPU and its equally impressive coprocessor was the Artist chip to replace the CRX window accelerator add-in board (AIB). That board marked