Post-loss S3 tallies two design wins

Electronic News, August 8, 1994

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- S3 Inc. is touting two separate designs wins--with Hewlett-Packard and Spider Graphics--for its 64-bit graphics accelerator products. The wins come as S3 attempts to recover from a 2Q loss of $4.7 million caused, the company said, by recent declines in the average selling price of its older 32-bit graphic accelerator products. The steep price drop is also expected to impact the company's forecasted revenue from such products during the second half of 1994.

Last week, however, S3 said HP selected its Vision864 for use in HP's new Vectra XM2 PC series and its earlier-announced Vectra XU PC family; while Spider Graphics, a Santa Clara-based graphics board vendor, picked the S3 Vision964 graphics accelerator chip for its Tarantula 64 graphics accelerator board.

The HP Vectra XM2 PC series is a 486-based networking and graphics PC. The HP Vectra XU PC series, introduced in March, is based on the Intel Pentium 90MHz and is now available for a reduced price. Both HP Vectra series systems integrate the S3 Vision864 directly onto the motherboard. The S3 Vision 864 is designed to off-load the system's CPU by accelerating various common graphics functions found in graphical operating systems and applications. The chip is a member of the multimediaenabled Vision family of 64-bit graphics accelerators offered by S3.

"The S3 graphics solution supports our strategy to deliver a new level of performance and functionality to the PC market at a competitive price," said Jacques Clay, general manager of HP's Personal Computer Division. "HP has been an S3 customer dating back to 1992 with our 16-bit, S3 924," said Terry Holdt, president and CEO at S3. "The new (line of) Vectra PCs, incorporating our 64-bit Vision technology, is a product of the close cooperation between S3 and HP."

Meanwhile, Spider Graphics will use the S3 Vision964 processor in its Tarantula 64 graphics accelerator board, which offers a range of software utilities designed to work with GUI (graphical user interface) applications and previously limited to high-end boards for graphics professionals.

The Tarantula 64 board comes with Spider Tools software utilities that provide users with a graphical interface for installation and access to the product's various features including support for true color (16.7 million colors) at 1024 x 768 (non-interlaced) while maintaining a refresh rate of up to 75MHz. The board is offered with 2 to 4MB of VRAM (video random access memory). Suggested retail price of the board is $359 for the 2MB version and $499 for the 4MB version.

Explaining the company's selection of the S3 chip for its board, Alan Tran, president of Spider Graphics, said "We believe that S3's Vision964 is the leading VRAM-based accelerator on the market today."

The S3 Vision964 features an internal 64-bit engine and external 64-bit data paths to bring high-end graphics to PC users. The VRAM-based Vision964 utilizes industry-standard VESA VL (Video Electronics Standards Association; VESA Local) or PCI local busses. The graphics accelerator is compatible with VGA (video graphics array) and SVGA (super VGA), and features VESA-compatible "Green PC" support.

The chip supports frame buffer memory bandwidth up to 240MB/sec. and sustains up to 720MB/sec. of data bandwidth to the display screen--a feature designed to offer users bandwidth to support greater color depths at high resolutions without compromising screen performance and image quality.