What makes the Prime so fast?

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

What really enabled the 3D plotter on Prime is a joint effort between Han and HP.

Han did all the app work. But his first version was "inefficient" because he had to do all the visual calculations in HPPL (rotation/transformation/projection/clipping...).

HP then updated the Triangle function to let it do natively all these operations. This saves a lot of arguments checking, bytecode interpreting, memory management... and allows the display to go much faster. Think of it as the equivalent of the first gen 'intelligent' 3D graphic card.

Such 3D was not possible on the 48g as calculations were much slower and drawing even slower. Plus, it only had a B&W screen.

Cyrille