TMS34010

The TMS34010, released in 1986, is the first programmable graphics processor integrated circuit. It is a full 32-bit processor which includes graphics-oriented instructions so it can serve as a combined CPU and GPU, and it was used as such in a number of high-profile arcade games such as Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam.

Design took place at TI facilities in Bedford, UK and Houston, Texas, U.S.A. First silicon was working at Texas Instruments (TI) in Houston in December 1985, and first shipment (a development board) was to IBM's workstation facility in Kingston, New York, in January 1986.

The TMS34010 is a bit addressable, 32-bit processor, with two register files, each with fifteen general purpose registers and sharing a sixteenth stack pointer register. Unlike all other microprocessors up to that time, it includes instructions for drawing into two-dimensional bitmaps, arbitrary variable-width data, and arithmetic operations on pixel data. The TMS34010 is not limited to executing hardwired primitives, and is capable of executing any general-purpose program in addition to graphics programs. The TMS34010 is supported by a full ANSI compliant C compiler.

The successor to the TMS34010, the TMS34020 (1988), provides several enhancements including an interface for a special graphics floating point coprocessor, the TMS34082 (1989). The primary function of the TMS34082 is to allow the TMS340 architecture to generate high quality three-dimensional (3D) graphics. The performance level of 60 million vertices per second was advanced at the time.

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