From a Discord I was on tonight:
thedodgegarage says that Akebia had a TMS34020-based card called "Stride" with an available TC8512 add-on card but can't find any other sources or pictures for that yet.
And there's some mention of a company called Division making a VR system based on 80860s and TC8512s. So there, it did see usage 😀
http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/primary_image.htm
http://www.geekdot.com/category/knowledge-bas … rd-party-trams/
https://textfiles.vistech.net/programming/vrfirm.txt

16-bit 3d accelerator. You are on a roll, Stiletto.

Putas wrote on 2021-04-14, 05:40:

16-bit 3d accelerator. You are on a roll, Stiletto.

Maybe, but I was wrong about one thing: it wasn't mid-90s! It predates that. Probably more like 1990, the datecodes on the board photo in the geekdot website seem to confirm that.

Stuff from this era... not really for gamers! More for CAD/CAM, animation/professional rendering, etc. Or as vlask calls it, "profi" 😀

Sampling in 1990- failed to reach 20 MHz:

https://www.findic.us/price/tc8512bf-je1mpDBme.html#doc_tab

Ah, you found Axel's Geekdot site. He's got a couple of pictures on that page from my collection, of some rare Transputers that I own (the size '2' TRAM with SIPP modules, as well as the Parsytec PowerTRAM modules which are pictured).

If that Toshiba chip was on that TRAM module with the INMOS video controller, it was almost certainly designed for a very specific scientific visualisation purpose. Transputers really didn't make it outside the realms of academia & research or custom designed bespoke solutions for very specific scientific problems.