A serious effort to make a POV-card would have to resort to many parallel
CPUs with their own cache of RAM, and a small segment of the visual scene
dedicated to it.  Imagine splitting the image field into tiles, then having a
pre-processor that would divide the task into just what each tile would contain.
    Now, each tile gets its own 2+ GHz CPU, ends up only having about 64 pixels,
and blazes through a special RISC high speed processor.  The microcode would be
dedicated to image processing, the textures and pigments would be flashed into
memory and could be updated, and then the output would be written into a video
frame buffer.
    Now you have a chance to actually make this thing.  This could be the
rebirth of the transputer, only with new technology.

Cheers!

Chip Shults
My robotics, space and CGI web page - http://home.cfl.rr.com/aichip

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