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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (13279)	6/14/1999 8:57:00 PM
From: Joe C.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

3dfx 10Q now available on freeedgar.com freeedgar.com Joe C.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (13279)	6/14/1999 9:00:00 PM
From: Peter S.	Respond to of 16960

Sun, you are a tenacious debater. Enough is enough, I agree. I think we have enough facts and opinions for everyone to make up their minds if they haven't already. Last months PC Data came out in the 3rd week of the month. I'm assuming this is a consistent pattern. Peter S

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (13279)	6/14/1999 9:30:00 PM
From: Marc	Respond to of 16960

3Dfx sues ex-customer Creative By Mark Hachman Electronic Buyers' News (06/14/99, 08:08:33 PM EDT) Graphics chip supplier 3Dfx Interactive Inc. has sued its former customer, Creative Technology Ltd., for copyright infringement and breach of contract. The suit, filed late last Thursday, names both Creative and its American subsidiary, Fremont, Calif.-based Creative Labs Inc., as co-defendants in the case. At issue is 3Dfx's Glide software programming interface, which allows software application developers to write code optimized for 3Dfx's chips. According to 3Dfx executives, the Glide software was allegedly used by Creative to design "Unified", another software program that would allow games written solely for Glide and 3Dfx 's chips to instead run on a variety of 3D graphics accelerators. While 3Dfx believed this was an illegal misappropriation of its intellectual property, Creative executives denied using 3Dfx's actual code. Instead, Creative executives said Creative had designed its own proprietary software to translate the Glide instructions into a format that could be understood by graphics chips that processed Microsoft Corp.'s generic DirectX graphics software. The suit attempts to halt distribution of the Unified software, available in a prototypical beta format on Creative's web site, and seeks financial damages as well. According to John Danforth, vice-president and general counsel for Creative Labs, Creative's position was and is that its Unified software included generic instructions common to all code, not just the Glide software. Creative will vigorously contest the suit, he said. "I don't see how that makes any difference," said Bruce Busby, director of intellectual property at 3Dfx, Santa Clara, Calif. "If they infringe, they infringe." Both sides said they had held discussions to resolve their differences in the weeks before the suit was filed, but that those discussions broke down at the time the Unified code was to be submitted to an independent third party for evaluation. Tomorrow, Creative plans to post a small piece of software known as a mini-driver, designed to further improve the performance of 3Dfx's Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee graphics chips using the OpenGL interface designed by Silicon Graphics Inc. Danforth and a company spokeswoman said the driver allows those two chips to display textures of 512 by 512 pixels, four times as large as the 256 by 256-pixel textures that the chips render using 3Dfx's own software. "This is the flip side to the [Unified] issue," Danforth said. "We're making their hardware more powerful...Would they object to it? They shouldn't, but they've been pretty unhappy with us in general." Before 3Dfx purchased add-on card maker STB Systems Inc. late last year, 3Dfx supplied chips to Creative as well as other graphics card vendors. After the acquisition, 3Dfx began distributing its own chips upon the STB cards, forcing card manufacturers like Creative to purchase chips from 3Dfx's rivals.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (13279)	6/15/1999 7:41:00 AM
From: Scott Garee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

I hate to tell you, but you are dead wrong on this one. SUNW is not a fabless chip maker. They make workstations and they buy their CPUs from others (including Intel as you pointed out). Can you define "fabless" for me? I think a fab is where you make chips, so "fabless" means you don't make chips. SUNW does not sell any workstation which does not use a Sparc processor. Chip producers make those chips for SUNW just like TSMC makes chips for TDFX. If you don't think SUNW controls the Sparc consortium you aren't thinking too clearly. SUNW gets royalties on every Sparc clone sold. Most clone makers (CompuAdd, Opus, the aforementioned Ross) are dead or dying. It's not exactly an awe-inspiring business model. Glide does not cost a lot for TDFX to maintain. I think it should continue to be maintained and extended. It will be very important as the other chip makers wait for MS to finish DX7 or get their OpenGL drivers updated.