HTC To Buy S3 Graphics From VIA 90
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.
yay more cocaine for htc exec (Score:1)
yay more cocaine for htc exec !
Units (Score:1)
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It's kinda like a NuYen. Or a DoubleDollar. Or a Spacebuck.
And of course those are all meaningless because as Ron Paul says, we need to go back to the Gold-Pressed Latinum Standard to fight inflation!
Now get me my teabag-infused tritanium cap. I have a tea party rally to get to!
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you get a +1 Shadowrun reference!
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I also didn't mention Altairian Dollars (recently collapsed), Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu either. What's your point?
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Agreed though if you need entropy out of a timestamp near the beginning of the string, reverse it first: ms.ss:mm:hh dd/MM/yyyy
-l
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We also have a much more logical big-endian way to write dates: 31/1/2000, as opposed to that ridiculous random-endian from the US !
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a more sane way to write dates is 2000/01/31.
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No, the sane way is 2000-01-31 [wikipedia.org].
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Bah! Real programmers use ordinal dates. Today is 2011188.
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Double bah! REAL programmers know (at the time of this post) it's 1310072421.
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ooops, you're right.
I meant: that, too: the end is at the beginning. damn yankees.
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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.
Then it goes to 11 endian.
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Unfortunately when you make it a datetime, the European order is bad and American worse. For sanity and sorting yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss is the best way, of course with a 24 hour clock not am/pm. Unfortunately it works great for an ISO standard, not so much for talking. If I say "We'll meet on the 23rd" then implicitly that means the 23 of this month, we don't start on the macro or the microlevel but somewhere in the middle. After all we don't start all our mail addresses with:
Milky Way
The "Sun" system
3rd planet
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Execution of
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Sol is Latin for sun. Just like Earth is called The Earth, Sun is called The Sun. Very clever naming huh?
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Oh...I remember the S3 ViRGE so well (Score:1)
S3 ViRGE the world's first graphics decelerator.
At least, it had its own version of MDK.
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For 3D games the ViRGE sucked, but the ViRGE and the Trio with a VBE 3.0 driver made 2D games rock out.
(Granted the games had to support VBE3.0...)
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I had the Trio64 on VLB with a 486 DX4-120. I could actually play Wing Commander 3/4 (except for the ground missions) at a decent framerate.
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Ugh, VLB [wikipedia.org]. That thing was a monster. I always felt I was going to destroy a board just trying to get it into the sockets.
-l
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Not surprising that the Rush was faster - it also cost about 4 times as much new. The ViRGE is much maligned, but it's quite unfair. A few games (e.g. Escape Velocity) had ViRGE editions that looked a lot better than the software rendering version. Someone also wrote an OpenGL driver for the ViRGE. I got 3 frames per second in GLQuake from that, while the software OpenGL implementation only got 0.3fps on the same machine (non-GL quake was a lot faster, but also a lot less pretty). Sure, my VooDoo 2 was
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The games LOOKED a lot better, but the framerates were still unplayable. I got an S3 Onboard promo CD with my ViRGE card, and it came with native demos of Escape Velocity and Actua Soccer.
Neither title was what I would call "playable." Escape Velocity cranked-out 15-20fps, and Actua Soccer was probably chugging at around 10fps. That might be faster than software, but it's not playable.
When I got my Rendition v2200 card, it was like night-and-day: games played smoothly at between 30/50fps in OpenGL/Direc
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The games LOOKED a lot better, but the framerates were still unplayable.
That's not the VIRGE's fault, though, that was the developers. They did their test and dev on stupidly high-end machines on which the VIRGE did not decrease frame rates. It didn't increase 'em either, it just improved the appearance significantly. Unfortunately, on a low-end machine they wouldn't scale back and you ended up with unplayability. And of course, everyone and their mom involved with the hardware told you to buy one and that it would be great on your rinky-dink CPU.
I had a friend with some MW2 ti
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Escape Velocity was perfectly playable on my ViRGE with all of the detail settings maxed out. Maybe it was a CPU problem for you, but with a Cyrix P166+ (cheap, overhyped, 133MHz Pentium clone) it was very smooth. I don't know what the exact frame rate was - I don't remember it being reported anywhere - but it was high enough that I never thought of it as low.
The v2200 was released two years after the ViRGE and cost twice as much. If it hadn't been significantly better, I'd have been very surprised.
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Hey, I'm typing this on a PIII with an S3 ViRGE!
It's perfectly usable for everyday tasks. I never tried any gaming though ('tis a PIII with 384MB RAM.)
S3 Logo? (Score:3)
In related news (Score:5, Insightful)
In a related story, S3 apparently still exists!
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Patents (Score:2)
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More importantly, anyone who implemented either of those two APIs to date already has a license agreement with S3, which would just carry over.
In case of Microsoft in particular, since S3TC is the format for textures in D3D and XNA, and has been for a long time now, I would be very surprised if there wasn't a perpetual, or at least long-term, license.
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Not quite. There's an unlicensed s3tc implementation for Mesa not ordinarily distributed in binary by most distributions, and of course not paid for either. It will be interesting to see whether HTC bothers with a transferable and non-exclusive exemption. There are plenty of games that don't work properly under Linux without the s3tc extension.
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My understanding is that this would be unused when any hardware-accelerated implementation (be it proprietary or open source) is used?
Anyway, S3 probably didn't bother because they couldn't expect to get anything there in the first place. But it's certain that all commercial players do pay - Microsoft probably does for D3D and tooling, NVidia does for its hardware and drivers (including Linux ones, I suppose) etc.
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No, the standard Mesa drivers (even when hardware acceleration is in place) simply do not support s3tc. The reason why S3 "didn't bother" with the other one is that it's mainly distributed as source code or through unofficial channels. Distros won't touch it due to the patent situation.
From the Phoronix forums, I see that HTC has a history of open source hostility (even refusing to release kernel source code), so I don't expect anything to change.
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Yes - DX6 texture compression is S3, as is GL_ARB_texture_compression for OpenGL 1.3 (prior to that it was EXT and ARB, which are essentially optional). In fact, this has been one of the major impediments for creating open source OpenGL drivers, because it is core now (and therefore required).
I personally find it highly derivative on prior art, but I found the same thing about most GPU implementations of Navier-Stokes (fluid dynamics) equations and have yet to hear of any of those being overturned. I guess
bubye (Score:2, Informative)
According to Wikipedia:
S3 Graphics, Ltd is an American company specializing in graphics chipsets.
There goes a successful purveyor of mobile GPU technology off to Taiwan... I wonder if this is what Andy Grove meant when he claimed [slashdot.org] that abandoning today's commodity manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry.
I'll bet Samsung wouldn't mind owning Tegra.
Re:bubye (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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S3 bought NumberNine, which was a pioneer in high-end 2D graphics. I bet S3 has a large enough patent portfolio to have some beneficial defensive patents.
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Yet, most companies who are using the technology based on those patents have by now most likely already licensed it. This texture compression, for example, has been in DirectX since version 6.0 which is nearly 13 years by now and OpenGL 1.3 which is 11 years old, so S3 has most likely already extracted all the royalties they are going to get from it from companies using that technology.
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The original xbox is deprecated, and the Xbox360 has an extremely low 512MB of shared (system+GPU) RAM. The PS3 at least has a whopping 256MB of RAM for the Cell, and 256MB GDDR RAM for the RSX. Yes, the Xbox360 really needs texture compression much more than the PS3.
Mobile 3D could make sure of texture compression, then again, with high end phones having 1GB of shared memory, it too isn't
VIA? LOL (Score:2, Funny)
Smart move because VIA is known for such outstanding quality.
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I would take a VIA chipset over this balls hot and drag ass slow nvidia thing that uses yet another fan in my pc
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At least nvidia stuff CAN be stable if you strap a leaf blower to it. VIA couldn't make something as simple as a door jam that work properly.
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I'd have to call bullshit on that. I have a file server that's going on it's 14th year of operation running a Via based board and processors. It was my desktop board when I was gaming with my Voodoo 5 and Pentium 3 back in the day. Now it keeps my information sorted.
Of course you don't realise that half the drivers on that system are saying 'Oh crap, a VIA board, I'm going to disable all these features because they just don't work'.
I know when I was developing GPU drivers on Windows one of the first things the driver did was check for a VIA chipset and then drop the AGP bus down to PCI-33 because they had so many problems talking to our AGP cards and trying to make it work wasn't worth the time.
No you wouldn't, or it would be so. (Score:1)
nt
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when I was shopping for a motherboard a couple years ago I had the choice of nvidia or ATI, neither are VIA
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Smart move because VIA is known for such outstanding quality.
But HTC is known for it's outstanding quality.
So HTC brings their QA and manufacturing processes to the technology they've just purchased from VIA...
That's how acquisitions are meant to work, the seller benefits from a cash injection, the buyer benefits from being able to make a new product and the customer benefits from better products.
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I see [s3graphics.com] the problem :) but at least one quite decent OS project still supports [cateee.net] your baby...
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At least they have the legacy drivers posted. They earned their "Legacy OS Support" badge.
What's VIA going to do now? (Score:1)
Is there some sort of back licensing of the graphics tech and patents from HTC to VIA? I thought the future is all about integration of CPU with GPU. VIA already had the graphics backend, not the greatest but it was there. Or are they slimming down to sell to someone like nvidia?
The VIA Nano CPU wasn't bad, it was sufficient for most workloads. The weakness of the VIA solutions have been the graphics drivers, they're ancient implementation. You can feel the late 90s in them from limited resolution suppor
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Is there some sort of back licensing of the graphics tech and patents from HTC to VIA?
I think they are. There has to be as S3's graphics technology are in VIA's chipsets.
S3 Savage Handheld (Score:2, Funny)
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Why is VIA not collecting royalties theirselves? (Score:3)
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Stupid editorial (Score:2)
It appears that HTC will be turning the tables on at least Microsoft and extracting royalties from them for a change.
Based on what? If S3 had something that they could be "extracting royalties" from they would have already been doing so. Also Microsoft could have already licensed those patents and HTC won't be doing anything at all. I know, that just doesn't fit an anti-Microsoft spin, though.
S3 (Score:1)
Fees? (Score:2)
Since S3TC is part of DirectX would Microsoft have to pay fees?