SX

The suffix attached to crippled models of older x86 processors; 386SX, 486SX. These were standard models of the processors, minus the floating point co-processor. The more conspiracy-oriented computer users are fairly convinced that it was a marketing scam by Intel to make people upgrade from SX to DX chips, and those more trusting of Intel believe that it was just a way of opening the bargain market. The processor cost in fact about the same to make, and sold for less, so that Intel actually had a smaller profit margin on them. While at the time it was generally regarded as a screwup, it opened the bargain market they could later introduce the Celeron in.

The other day on eBay (which I browse when bored), I spotted a 486SX desktop offering "affordable speed." Bahahahahahah.

Also called CG14 (for Color Graphics, number fourteen), and occasionally spam in some older documentation, the SX is the name given by Sun Microsystems to the graphics card fitted to the motherboard of the SPARCstation 20. It is a 2D-only card, capable of high resolution in 24-bit color, with hardware acceleration. Unusually for an onboard device, it required the installation of a video SIMM (VSIMM) into one of the SPARCstation 20's RAM slots, which contained the interface logic, the accelerator chip, and either 4 or 8 MB of framebuffer RAM. The SS20 featured 2 such RAM slots, and could in fact take 2 VSIMMs - but to take advantage of the second VSIMM, an inexpensive SBus card containing a 13W3 connector and a RAMDAC chip was required.

The SX is supported under Linux, Solaris, OpenBSD, NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. NetBSD supports it, but without acceleration. It provides 24-bit color output at either 1152x900 with a 4MB VSIMM, or 1280x1024 with additional pixmap cache with an 8MB VSIMM. Unlike most PC graphics accelerators, it's not possible to trade color depth for resolution or vice versa.

There also exists a variant of the SPARCstation 10, referred to as the SPARCstation 10 SX, which has an onboard CG14. Most SS10s seem to have the VSIMM slots, but only the 10SX has the onboard 13W3 connector and DAC. The Sun part numbers for the SS10SX VSIMMs and extender card are different than those for the SS20, but they're physically identical.