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S3 Buys Diamond Multimedia

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the consolidations-the-game dept.

Anonymous Cowboy wrote in to tell us that S3 has aquired Diamond Multimedia. "Why" is still sorta up in the air, but hey, consolidation is all the rage these days. Maybe they'll bundle Rio's with video cards or something.

4 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Damn... now who sels NVIDIA? by Booker · · Score: 3

    Great... now that NVIDIA seems to be one of the leading 3D hardware providers to support Linux, who's gonna actually make the cards? STB? er.. no, 3dfx only. Diamond? Nope, they're an S3 shop. Guess that leaves Creative, and all of the taiwanese clone boards. For one, this means less competition for NVIDIA-based boards, so I assume that Creative will be free of some price pressures. Damn... wonder how long 'til Pepsico buys 'em all.

  2. Not surprising. by Stiletto · · Score: 3

    Why? Not a difficult question to answer. Same reason why 3dfx bought STB... Chip manufacturers want more control over the final product. When you only make chips, it's up to the whim of the board manufacturer what size/type of memory to use, what clock speed, what features, etc. S3 must be realizing they can put out a better total package if they have control over the entire path from the chip to the monitor plug.

    It will be interesting to see how these new "uber-companies" compete with companies like ATI, Matrox, etc. who already do the chips and boards by themselves.

    If these board company buyups prove to be successful, watch for other chip-only companies like nVidia, etc. to follow the lead.

  3. What's wrong with S3? by John+Fulmer · · Score: 3

    Nothing really. They basicly won the 2D chipset market 2 years ago with some very decent chips (Matrox was faster, but S3 was MUCH cheaper).

    Then they did a HUGE misstep with the S3 Virge 3D chipsets, which were somewhat buggy for 2D and really bad for 3D, even at that time. This caused S3's reputation to suffer greatly, and they lost a lot of the customer loyalty, from both vendors and end-users.

    The new Savage 3D chipsets are reported to actually be pretty good, performance-wise, but it is also reported that they need better drivers for Windows 9x, and I don't think that S3 has released specs for the XFree86 community yet.

  4. STOP THE PRESS!! by Keith+Russell · · Score: 3

    From ZDNN:
    Diamond shareholders balk at S3 deal
    The full story should be very interesting.

    Keith Russell
    OS != Religion

    --
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