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S3's DeltaChrome Graphics Chip
Noob Jones writes "The Tech Report has an article about a new video card in the works at S3. 'S3 Graphics is back with a new chip, dubbed DeltaChrome, which looks like it might just be strong enough to become a player in the mid-range consumer graphics market.' With a third player back in the graphics market both Nvidia and ATi are going to have things to worry about but this can only spell good news for customers."
I havent seen one company out there that makes small BGA chips for handheld markets and PDAs. The chip must be taking VERY low power, should support OpenGL, and must have drivers including OpenGL 1.4 support in Linux, NetBSD, QNX, QTopia and WindowsCE.
I was trying to look for such a chip and found only the embedded versions of NVidia and Radeon which are obscenely grotesque for handheld devices. For resolutions maximum of which are 640x480 and color depths of max 16bits, there must be a 3d video chip that supports OpenGL 1.4. It will at least be used in the next GBA, NGage and other handhelds and cellphones.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
S3 isn't going to make a dent unless they can seriously compete with what ATI/Nvidia have out on the top-end market.
They said the same thing about Trident's new cards. And Matrox's (Parhelia). Both turned out to be horrible.
ATI to me means poor driver support, not neccesarily more stable then NVIDIA but the installers would be better applied with batch files. Performancewise they are as fast as they want to be. But they have been around forever and probably always will be.
NVIDIA to me means aswome driver installation but be prepared to roll back. Performancewise they are as fast as their agp speed. These guys are the ones who killed 3dfx, yet we dont hold a grudge againts them for it.
S3 to means cheap cheap, not value value, install in machines that will never have a monitor hooked up with the sole purpose of getting past a post test.
I would be much more impressed with a new name comming out of nowhere and whipping the competition like nvidia did to 3dfx. And if they needed some foundation they could point to the fact that they have been making cards for years but are an entirely different company (in mindset at least).
Via makes: C3 cpu [a joke, but still a cpu], northbridge, southbridge, S3 embeded video on chipsets + discret parts, Firewire phy layer, USB 2.0, and Envy sound chips. Enter the EPIA that everyone is so fond of [hey! it's cute] Via makes the whole thing in house! It may be low end, and cheap, but they make the whole thing so they get every red cent they can squeeze out of it! Oh they also make many other "driver" chips for CD ROMS, and other devices. They probably make just as many, if not more, parts as intel in-house. They're a sleeping giant waiting for an opportunity...like the EPIA boards!