3
C H A P T E R
2
Reserving DRAM for SX
Accelerated Applications
Introduction
One of the performance enhancements for SX applications is the availability of
physically contiguous DRAM. Physically contiguous DRAM for SX will be referred
to in this document as SXDRAM. This document describes:
■
The process of configuring SXDRAM for exclusive use by the SX accelerated
applications.
■
The application context in which SXDRAM is used
■
The advantages of using SXDRAM
SX provides acceleration of the graphics and imaging segments of applications that
run on a SPARCstation 10SX or SPARCstation 20 workstation. Acceleration can be
used for a wide range of pixel operations, including 2D and 3D graphics rendering,
multimedia, and image processing.
The SX accelerator, built into the SMC, can directly accelerate operations on both the
system main memory (DRAM) and the video memory (VRAM). The SMC is
comprised of:
1. An error-correcting code memory controller which interfaces with both the
system main memory (DRAM) and the video memory (VRAM; the frame buffer)
to the system memory bus.
2. The SX imaging and graphics accelerator.
