Nearly five years ago Mike Sartain and I had just put the wraps on our x86 software renderer, Pixomatic. We had done everything we could think of to
speed it up, and while it had certainly gotten a lot faster, it was still so much slower than hardware that we knew we could never close the gap. As we were
setting up in the RAD Game Tools booth at Game Developers Conference one morning, I said to Mike: “Man, if only Intel had a lerp [linear
interpolation] instruction!”
Mike pointed across the aisle at the Intel booth. “Maybe you should ask for one.”
The odds seemed long, to say the least, but I didn’t have any better ideas, so I went over and talked with Dean Macri, our developer rep. That resulted in a
couple of maverick Intel architects, Doug Carmean and Eric Sprangle, coming over to chat with us later; and somehow, over the course of five years, that
simple question led to a team at RAD — which grew to include Tom Forsyth and Atman Binstock — working with Intel to help design an instruction set
extension and write a software graphics pipeline for it.