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HTC To Buy S3 Graphics From VIA
jones_supa writes "The Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC has bought the graphics department of VIA Technologies, S3 Graphics. This $300 million dollar deal brings HTC the ownership of new patents and graphics visualization technologies. 'In addition to its traditional markets in PCs and game consoles, S3 Graphics Texture Compression technology is increasingly being applied to smartphones and tablets, HTC said.'"
It appears that HTC will be turning the tables on at least Microsoft and extracting royalties from them for a change.
yay more cocaine for htc exec !
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
"$300 million dollar deal" - How much is a dollar dollar anyway?
S3 ViRGE the world's first graphics decelerator.
At least, it had its own version of MDK.
Maybe a parrot pining for the fjords?
In a related story, S3 apparently still exists!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The S3 Texture compression algorithm is used in OpenGL and Direct X. So now anyone who implements either of those APIs will be paying HTC.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
According to Wikipedia:
S3 Graphics, Ltd is an American company specializing in graphics chipsets.
There goes a successful purveyor of mobile GPU technology off to Taiwan... I wonder if this is what Andy Grove meant when he claimed that abandoning today's commodity manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry.
I'll bet Samsung wouldn't mind owning Tegra.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Smart move because VIA is known for such outstanding quality.
Still looking for working drivers on modern OSs for my S3 Savage2000
Is there some sort of back licensing of the graphics tech and patents from HTC to VIA? I thought the future is all about integration of CPU with GPU. VIA already had the graphics backend, not the greatest but it was there. Or are they slimming down to sell to someone like nvidia?
The VIA Nano CPU wasn't bad, it was sufficient for most workloads. The weakness of the VIA solutions have been the graphics drivers, they're ancient implementation. You can feel the late 90s in them from limited resolution support to constant crashes (at least on XP). I think I was trying to get a Nano ITX solution to run at 1280 x 720, but it just wouldn't do it. Had to run it at 1280 x 1024 or 1024 x 768. Tried using Powerstrip but still didn't get me the resolution I wanted.
So will HTC's smart phones get VESA3 support, terrible OpenGL, an annoying "InControl99" panel and the most unstable crashiest video drivers on the planet?
As $subj? What is a business reason for collecting one time money, if they have a chicken still producing eggs?
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
It appears that HTC will be turning the tables on at least Microsoft and extracting royalties from them for a change.
Based on what? If S3 had something that they could be "extracting royalties" from they would have already been doing so. Also Microsoft could have already licensed those patents and HTC won't be doing anything at all. I know, that just doesn't fit an anti-Microsoft spin, though.
the trick is that they managed to convince htc that the team(they gotta have some guys left still, but maybe ) and the patents are relevant in a big way - though then again 300 million for htc right now isn't that lot-. if they asked for big money from everyone on who's cards it was possible to do texture decompression on gpu side, then yeah, they'd get good money, but the gpu's have changed in design to be more flexible, so that you could just add that (decompression on the fly)code on sw you run on the card, so card and game developers could just pass the patent ball back and forth, who pays it, so even if they're getting some money it's pretty insignificant(if you have a recent stand alone bought card, the manual would probably have a list of who they're paying to, as list of licensees and such, you could look up if s3 is mentioned or not- of course, notebooks don't actually have as good manuals for internal parts). of course they might have other patents too and a really good research team, but it's not well known anywhere what their contributions lately would have been, so it's not significant.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They want their joke back.
There are some graphics projects back in the '90's that relied on stable VESA implementations, and these projects
had graphics much more sophisticated and pretty than anything DirectDraw and OpenGL had in the early 2000's.
VESA is a standard of America, and it is foolish to export it to Taiwan. The Blackberry itself is practically a 80386 computer re-modeled into a phone, and if VESA was tagged by Motorolla then maybe they could work on an embedded computer phone that brought American computing back into perspective of a hand-held rather than the classic beige monolithic boxes. Every American would buy one if it was fabricated on America and it brought all their DOS and early Linux environment back into a simplified environment. Those were the days when someone can write a program and it would just run, but now after DEC Alpha disappeared then there is no all-American avenue. It' s all foreign.
The two companies are very closely linked anyway. No-one seems to have remembered that the husband of Cher Wang (co-founder of HTC) is Chen Wen-Chi, CEO of VIA. Cher Wang herself also sits on the board of VIA. Probably agreed the details over dinner.
>trying to get it into the sockets.
VIRGE-in detected.
Seriously, it was always a tight fit, and it was only more difficult the longer you didn't clean your case. My case it seems, attracted so-much dust that simply removing and inserting would give just enough friction that it would make the motherboard bend. I even salvaged curb-side desktops that had creases in the brea/mainboard where someone did just that: almost catastrophically break their motherboard in trying to insert a VLB expansion card.
The trick is to make certain there are plastic mounting studs supporting the mainboard from bending in, and cleaning the sockets with a vaccum cleaner while agitating the dusty dirt using a small paintbrush that could fit into the socket and twisted.
I thought it said $3 Graphics!
nt
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
all over the slider bars
Since S3TC is part of DirectX would Microsoft have to pay fees?
S3, as far as I know, has never been at the cutting edge of computer graphics/video processing. I look at them as a sort of technological cousin of Intel's integrated graphics platform(s). Does this help HTC beyond getting some IP? Are there other mobile and/or integrated GPU companies that would have been a better fit? Anyone made an offer for Nvidia lately?