Everybody in the graphics business definitely remember Bitboys Oy, a company from the late nineties that promised to bring us revolutionary and fast graphics processors crushing all the competitors, including 3dfx and NVIDIA. They never released anything commercially and their beta-hardware sometimes appeared to be too buggy to be released. Since the industry continued going forward while Bitboys tried to fix their hardware design, in order to reassure the crowd about its perfection, Bitboys had to announce the changes of their plans to reflect the recent fashion proposed by really big players.

In short, Bitboys never launched anything commercially, but became legendary just because of its endless promises. However, the company needed funds to live on and now it has finally developed a real technology that is available now for licensing. Today the Espoo, Finland-based graphics firm announced Acceleon, a family of graphics processors for mobile and embedded devices. Acceleon, as a family of IP core solutions, provides a performance and feature set that is targeted toward various handheld devices, including mobile phones, PDAs and entertainment devices.

Acceleon Visual Platform serves as the foundation for the use of Acceleon graphics hardware. As an optimized, turnkey software/hardware solution, Acceleon Visual Platform provides full compatibility with graphics API standards such as an early version of OpenGL ES, while providing varying levels of performance based on the Acceleon graphics processor core used.

The Acceleon family of graphics processors consists of the following products:

• Acceleon G10 - As the basis for all subsequent members of the Acceleon family, this processor provides hardware acceleration of vector- and 3D-graphics content. The G10 ore is designed for the volume market embedded devices, accelerating the visual user interface graphics and highly interactive, real-time gaming content.

• Acceleon G20 - A graphics processor for handheld gaming, interactive wireless applications and user interface acceleration. The G20 core provides a complete feature set for 3D graphics rendering, while retaining full backwards compatibility with Acceleon G10. Provided are features such as textured triangle rendering, pixel color processing, shading, texture filtering and image anti-aliasing.

• Acceleon G30 - A state-of-the-art 3D graphics processor for handheld devices, providing performance and scalability for even the most demanding mobile games and applications. The G30 graphics processor supports all industry standard graphics APIs, including an early version of OpenGL ES 1.0. Support of graphics standards provides a safe, solid platform for application developers. Cross-platform applications and games can be executed with high frame rates and with superb image quality.

Acceleon supports an advanced hardware anti-aliasing system that provides no performance penalty when enabled. This advanced feature significantly enhances the quality of all applications on the Acceleon platform, a feature especially noticeable on the low-resolution displays typically found on mobile devices. Additionally, Acceleon supports industry standard graphics APIs for application compatibility:

• OpenGL ES 1.0 (early version);
• JSR-184 (early version);
• SVG 1.1 (including SVG Tiny and SVG Basic subsets);
• Java 2D;
• Acceleon vector graphics library;
• Acceleon 3D graphics library;
• Gaming middleware.

Acceleon Visual Platform is able to utilize any one of the Acceleon graphics processors for accelerating graphics rendering by moving the most intensive rendering tasks to dedicated hardware. The unique combination of hardware and software allows for a full product range of handheld devices to be designed with the same graphics functionality, but with variable level of rendering performance.

Bitboys will demonstrate the Acceleon cores and technology – available today for licensing – at the SIGGRAPH 2003 in San Diego, California, during July 29 - 31 (booth #3151).