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HTC To Buy S3 Graphics From VIA

Posted by Unknown on from the patent-warfare dept.

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.

2 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. bubye by TopSpin · · Score: 1, Informative

    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
    1. Re:bubye by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Why don't you try to learn what the fuck you're talking about before you post. First off, S3 doesn't make mobile GPUs, and near as I can tell they never had. Recently, their only product has been northbridge chipsets for VIA motherboards and I think a couple of really low end discreet cards. Second, it's a serious stretch to call them successful in any sense of the word, if they hadn't been bought by VIA they would have gone out of business some time ago. Third, and more to the point of your retarded post, they already were Taiwanese based, as VIA is a Taiwanese company. So one Taiwanese company sold a shitty division to another Taiwanese company, hard to make a statement about US manufacturing based on that.