… 1994: Intel is giving those interested in Pentium a speed rush with two new expansion levels: The new Pentium generation started at 75 MHz after the 60/66 MHz era. Fast 90 and even 100 MHz Pentium CPUs are now available. The 60 and 66 MHz models were the only “real” P5 CPUs, because from the 75 MHz level Intel changed the production of the processors from 800 nm to 500 nm and at the same time the supply voltage from 5 to 3.3 Volts reduced. The new P54C added 200,000 transistors, bringing the total to 3.3 million circuits. Further innovations: The internal clock frequency was set by the front-side bus multiplier and the P54Cs were in principle able to work in teams of two CPUs. Incidentally, all of these Pentium models were potentially affected by the infamous FDIV bug.
… 2000: Ati announces that it will reveal details about the Charisma engine and Pixel Tapestry architecture at the Games Developers Conference on March 10th and 11th. There is a promise of a difficult-to-translate “10x increase in 3D graphics” (can be meant as a tenfold increase in the level of detail as well as in performance) for the new geometry and pixel units that will later be included in the Radeon – but Ati is still talking about this “upcoming products” in which the two units are to be used.
The “Charisma Engine” geometry unit will be able to handle key frame animation and 3D skinning, while the “Pixel Tapestry” pixel unit will be particularly optimized for multi-texturing. In fact, it has a three-stage texture pipeline, which does not contain full-fledged TMUs throughout and cannot carry out all operations in the third stage.