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.

Comments

S3 Logo?

[Sponge Bath]

Maybe a parrot pining for the fjords?

In related news

[kimvette]

In a related story, S3 apparently still exists!

VIA? LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Smart move because VIA is known for such outstanding quality.

Re:Units

[CastrTroy]

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.

S3 Savage Handheld

[Hsien-Ko]

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?

Re:bubye

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Units

[TheRaven64]

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.

Why is VIA not collecting royalties theirselves?

[Skinkie]

As $subj? What is a business reason for collecting one time money, if they have a chicken still producing eggs?

Re:Oh...I remember the S3 ViRGE so well

[hairyfeet]

They also made great little basic desktop boards, with low power and low noise. I sold one of those a couple of months back, one of the old Trio S3s. It just goes to show that being a pack rat isn't always a bad thing when it comes to tech.

I had a customer whose little Win2K bookkeeping box blew the onboard and he needed it back up like yesterday. The only PCI graphics card I had at the time was an old S3 pull so I told him I'd be happy to let him have that for $15 ($5 for the part, $10 to put it in and give the machine a good fan cleaning) and then I could order him something better the next week. So the next week rolls around and I call him asking when he wants me to order a new card and he says "Why bother? This one is working great, the picture is fine, the machine is quiet. I'm happy."

So I can see why HTC might want to buy the old S3 tech. They do make great basic graphics chips that sip power and are quiet as church mice. As TFA says it probably has a lot to do with the patents but having a nice basic GPU couldn't hurt either.

I just think it is sad the OEM payoff and compiler rigging by Intel has just about destroyed Via. AMD got a nice payout, though I'd argue it was a drop in the bucket compared to how much Intel cost them by paying OEMs to take the sucktastic P4 over the AMD Athlon 64, but Via was pretty much erased from the map by that BS. It is sad because from what I've seen the Via CPUs would not only make killer little netbook chips but would probably rock for low power servers thanks to the built in crypto chips. But as normal money wins over new ideas or innovation.