S3 provides leading-edge multimedia chipset for Compaq's new TrueQ Sound and Motion Technology

Business Wire, Sept 13, 1995

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 13, 1995--S3 Inc.'s (NASDAQ: SIII) Cooperative Accelerator Architecture chipset provides the graphics and video acceleration and hardware-based MPEG decoding components of the TrueQ Sound and Motion Technology being revealed today by Compaq as it introduces its Presario 5500 and 9500 Series.

S3 and Compaq teamed in June of this year to announce a multimedia strategy designed to provide a wide range of consumer PCs with TV-quality video and CD-quality audio at affordable prices for the 1995 Christmas buying season. A crucial component to this strategy was S3's introduction of a low-cost hardware MPEG audio and video decoder solution designed for the motherboard.

"Compaq is aggressively driving the multimedia market, and has selected S3 to help them do so. S3's Cooperative Accelerator Architecture allows Compaq to provide a cost-efficient, full-featured, entry-level MPEG system without sacrificing quality," said Gary Johnson, S3's senior vice president and general manager of multimedia and mobile products. "In addition, the Cooperative Accelerator Architecture provides a scalable architecture that supports high-end multimedia systems. Compaq's aggressive recruitment of MPEG titles, a program that S3 has supported, will drive toward providing families and individuals who purchase a Presario for the holiday season with a strong set of multimedia offerings ready for their entertainment, education, or reference."

"S3's breakthrough in video acceleration allows Compaq to offer the most lifelike multimedia PC experience available," said Rod Schrock, vice president, Presario products, Compaq Computer Corp.

"Compaq customers can now take advantage of MPEG full-screen video in their Compaq PCs, with an array of entertainment and educational CD-ROM titles, all at extremely attractive prices," Schrock said.

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 95 operating system has provided additional momentum for software developers to create multimedia entertainment applications that fully exploit full-motion video and digital music. Windows 95 includes dramatically improved CD-ROM access, and more robust video and audio playback that takes advantage of powerful hardware implementations of MPEG now. S3's Cooperative Accelerator Architecture provides Plug and Play compatible hardware support for the Windows 95 DirectDraw feature set to increase the acceleration of games that take advantage of the DirectDraw API. In addition, S3's Streams Processor technology enables video and graphics to be combined on the fly from a single, inexpensive frame buffer. The Streams Processor technology also provides support for interactive video effects, allowing end-users to play feature-rich games under Windows 95.

"Some industry pundits - especially those who have not been able to get their offerings out in time for this buying season - say that it is too early for high-quality multimedia systems, but our research shows otherwise," said Michael P. Nell, S3's director of marketing, multimedia. "We believe that consumers are eager to incorporate high quality video from both analog television and CD-ROM sources. CD-ROM video quality has been limited until now by the poor quality of software-only AVI codecs and the high cost of hardware MPEG decoder boards. S3's hardware-based MPEG solution breaks the affordability barrier and enables consumers to have high quality at low cost."

The controversy surrounding the benefits of hardware versus software implementations of the MPEG-1 standard is based on the speed of the CPU and the amount of bandwidth it will be able to devote to decompressing MPEG sound and motion data streams. Software proponents suggest that the new, faster processors have the bandwidth to provide the 30 frames per second video and 16-bit audio required for TV-like picture and CD-like audio quality.

Hardware-based MPEG proponents, such as S3, maintain that the high percentage of the CPU bandwidth that software-only solutions consume will be an unacceptable penalty for most users, particularly when viewing highly-interactive MPEG multimedia titles.

With Windows 95 making true pre-emptive multitasking a reality of millions of PC users, strategies which assume that 100 percent of the CPU's processing bandwidth will always be available for a single application are unwise, particularly for the most demanding tasks such as MPEG audio and video decoding.

"Multimedia acceleration is following the same path that graphics acceleration followed just a few years ago," said Johnson. "Why waste valuable CPU cycles on functions that can be supported inexpensively in hardware? Intelligent partitioning of MPEG functions between the CPU and accelerator chips makes high-quality MPEG compression technology affordable while it offloads cycle-consuming tasks. This leaves the CPU free for those applications and functions that we all know will soon gobble up all that `extra' bandwidth."

S3's Cooperative Accelerator Architecture is a three-chip multimedia solution designed to fulfill the demand for increased performance for the cost-sensitive user. The S3 Trio64V+ multimedia accelerator offers a pin-compatible upgrade path to its predecessor, the Trio64 graphics accelerator, that delivers high-end video and graphics capabilities to the commercial and home desktop PC markets without the need for redesign. It is a 64-bit, DRAM-based digital video-enable integrated graphics and video accelerator with the capability to interface directly to live video and MPEG-1 peripherals such as S3's Scenic/MX2 MPEG decoder. It incorporates an enhanced version of the graphics core and high-performance 135MHz true-color RAMDAC clock that is found on the Trio64 chip.