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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.
S3 ViRGE the world's first graphics decelerator.
At least, it had its own version of MDK.
Maybe a parrot pining for the fjords?
A dollar dollar is roughly equlivalent to 12 bitcoins. Personally, I like the way the French do it. Write the $ after the number, that way it's more consistent with the way we write all our other units. Why I'm typing, I usually end up having to go back to put the dollar sign in after because you say the "dollar" part after the numbers.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
In a related story, S3 apparently still exists!
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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.
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.
Actually, the only way that makes sense for dates is 2011-07-04 = July 4, 2011. Numbers should go from biggest unit to smallest unit. You don't write time like 54:12:32 for 54 minutes and 32 seconds past noon.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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?
We also have a much more logical big-endian way to write dates: 31/1/2000, as opposed to that ridiculous random-endian from the US !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
a more sane way to write dates is 2000/01/31.
you get a +1 Shadowrun reference!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's a little-endian date. The least significant number (the day) comes first and the most significant (the year) comes last. ISO dates are big endian. US dates are middle endian, as popularised by the PDP-11.
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As $subj? What is a business reason for collecting one time money, if they have a chicken still producing eggs?
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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.
Agreed though if you need entropy out of a timestamp near the beginning of the string, reverse it first: ms.ss:mm:hh dd/MM/yyyy
-l
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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.
Yet you still say "past noon" after minutes and seconds which doesn't make sense
That's probably square dollars. Imagine a line with 300 million 1 dollar banknotes on one side, then on each banknote put another 300M-1 banknotes on top :)
I see the problem :) but at least one quite decent OS project still supports your baby...
I also didn't mention Altairian Dollars (recently collapsed), Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu either. What's your point?
No, the sane way is 2000-01-31.
Unfortunately when you make it a datetime, the European order is bad and American worse. For sanity and sorting yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss is the best way, of course with a 24 hour clock not am/pm. Unfortunately it works great for an ISO standard, not so much for talking. If I say "We'll meet on the 23rd" then implicitly that means the 23 of this month, we don't start on the macro or the microlevel but somewhere in the middle. After all we don't start all our mail addresses with:
Milky Way
The "Sun" system
3rd planet
[Country]
[State]
{City]
[Street]
[House]
[Section]
[Apartment]
Usually we start in the middle with road and go down "Whitford Lane 13C apt. 4" then back up again to city, state, country etc. just like we do for dates. It's rather practical since most mail you send is domestic, so if you didn't add it then it was implicit. That definitively works better placed after than before. If you have a full address then of course it doesn't really matter.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Bah! Real programmers use ordinal dates. Today is 2011188.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
syntax error at ./#36686422 line 10, near "{" ./#36686422 aborted due to compilation errors.
Execution of
Sun is a generic term for a star. I believe our star is called Sol. If I am not mistaken, the planets are named after the star and in order of distance from the star. IE earth would be Sol 3.
Double bah! REAL programmers know (at the time of this post) it's 1310072421.
I thought it said $3 Graphics!
Did you warn them?
-- Linux user #369862
nt
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
At least they have the legacy drivers posted. They earned their "Legacy OS Support" badge.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
ooops, you're right.
I meant: that, too: the end is at the beginning. damn yankees.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Since S3TC is part of DirectX would Microsoft have to pay fees?
That's a little-endian date. The least significant number (the day) comes first and the most significant (the year) comes last. ISO dates are big endian. US dates are middle endian, as popularised by the PDP-11.
Then it goes to 11 endian.
Sol is Latin for sun. Just like Earth is called The Earth, Sun is called The Sun. Very clever naming huh?