Texas Instruments Corporation

William S Egr

Michael D Asal

Denis R Beaudoin

Jerry R Van Aken

Michael A Denio

James G Littleton

Michael J Hanrahan

Douglas C Crawford

Gregory Guyotte

Graham Short

A communications system for enabling extension of an internal common bus architecture (CBA) segment of a first root physical device to an internal CBA bus segment of one or more remote external physical device includes the first root physical device having a first serial communications interface module in the root device coupled between said internal CBA bus segment and an input and output port of the root device for serializing bus transactions from the first device to the output port of the root device and deserializing data received from at the input port to the internal CBA bus segment of the first device. The remote external physical device includes a second serial communications interface module coupled between the internal CBA bus segment and an input and output port of the remote device for serializing bus transactions from the remote device to the output port of the remote device and deserializing data received at the input port to the internal CBA bus segment of said remote device. The modules are coupled to each other by an external cabling. An enumerator in the root device obtains knowledge of the remote hardware module and accompanying register set by abstracting these details and automatically configuring the remote module in the system.

Method of allowing multiple, hardware embedded configurations to be recognized by an operating system

An interface for use with a multiprocessor computer system, having a host processor system and a graphics processor system. The interface permits extended functions to be developed on the host system or on another system, and subsequently loaded to the graphics processor system. The interface comprises software residing on both the host system side and the graphics system side, which operates at run time to permit the function to be called from a main program running on the host. The function's arguments are passed to the graphics system so that the function is executed by the graphics processor.

Multiprocessor software interface for a graphics processor subsystem

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McKinney, TX, United States of America

William S Egr