S3 Lives! It Also Delivers A New GPU

For those wanting a bit more competition in the graphics market, there is hope. No, I’m not talking about the over-valued and under-delivered Intel Larrabee project from Intel. (that project seems to be in terminal delay mode)

The competition I speak of is from S3, the graphics company that has been on life support for years, but refuses to die. This last week, in China, the company shoed a new GPGPU chip that is in the Chrome series, and promises that the company will soldier on for a while longer – and make a small promise that the company might just become a choice for some.

A small notice on the Tech Connect site brings this -

This week at the Electronic Manufacturer Exposition (eMEX) in Suzhou, China, S3 Graphics has unveiled the Chrome 5400E, a power-efficient GPGPU processor that’s claimed to offer a an excellent blend of graphics functionality, performance, power, longevity and stability for high quality embedded graphics solutions.

The new chip comes in a small form-factor (23 x 23 mm) BGA package, is manufactured on 65nm process technology and features support for x1/x4/x8/x16 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes, DDR2 and GDDR3 memory, it boasts the ChromotionHD 2.1 Programmable Video Engine providing H.264, MPEG-2 HD, WMV9-HD, and VC-1 acceleration, and also includes native display support for 2x Dual-Channel LVDS, DisplayPort, 2x Dual-Link DVI and HDMI with HDCP. Moreover, the Chrome 5400E has a programmable unified-shader-architecture which enables it to have DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenCL 1.0 support.

As for driver support, S3 says that its Chrome processor will work with everything from Windows XP, Vista and 7 to Windows CE and Linux distros based on the 2.6.xx kernel.

For more info about the Chrome 5400E see this page.

Following to the above link takes you to the full specifications of the GPU, and shows that if the unit does anywhere near what the paper claims are, it will be a solid choice for many.

Those who follow these things know that the high-end designs are what gets attention, but the mid-line is what gets the orders. So with enough orders for this mid-line product, perhaps S3 will have the motivation to bring out something that will wow us once again.

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not everyone needs one of these!