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Technology Stocks : S3 (A LONGER TERM PERSPECTIVE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ski who wrote (7959)	11/17/1997 10:54:00 PM
From: Jan A. Van Hummel	Respond to of 14577

Ski, Bill , Phil Thanks for the informative posts recently. Your insights are very helpful. There is no question that consolidation will take place. Will S3 be a front runner? Not the way they are going right now. At the same token the company is now so "cheap" that it may actually accelerate the process. They are more attractive than ever as a takeover candidate. When that happens it may not be at $25 or $30, but it won't be at $7 either. JMHO Jan

To: Ski who wrote (7959)	11/18/1997 11:50:00 AM
From: Bill Lin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14577

Ski, Phil, Jan, There isn't that much difference between OpenGL and Direct3D from the chip perspective So, why is the Rage Pro 2 GL benchmarks so cruddy? <j/k, VBG> i know that question will set you off, since you covered it in ATI thread. Consolidation in 2-3 yrs not next year. reason: too much expanding capacity in Asia for fabs. \|The potential of recession/5% growth in SEA may cause a pause in corporate actions in Tech Sector. Only most aggressive will plunge into the pit. And we all know about catching a falling knife in investing. (also what big tech company will admit they cannot grow inhouse the capability?) MORE TO THE POINT, WANT TO COMMENT ON BYTE MAGAZINE ARTICLE? from p. 92 of byte, Dec. '97 issue "3D: Chip or Card?" Some graphics cards already have 3-D accelerator chips, but the new extensions from AMD, Cyrix, and Centaur will not make them obsolete. Only the most expensive, high-end cards have fast geometry engines. Mainstream cards accelerate the later states of 3-D processing: triangle setup (converting 3-D polygon coordinates into 2-D screen coordinates), texture mapping (applying solid patterns to the wire frame), and rasterizing (painting the textured object on the screen). Indeed, some 3-D accelerators will get a boost fromt he extensions because the accelerators can render polygons faster than existing CPU's can keep up. Nvidia's RIVA 128 chip, for example --used by Dell, Diamond, Gateway, Micron, and others -- can render 1.5 million typical polygons per second. But even a 300Mhz Pentium II can't supply enough coordinates for more than a million polygons per second, says Dave Reed, technical marketing director at Nvidia. "This will be great for us, " he says. "We've got the headroom to handle it." by Tom R. Halfhill, San Mateo CA thalfhill@byte.com BYTE. This in last half of comparison of MMX "2" vs 3D extensions coming out next year by x86 "cloners" and Intel. They also do a comparison of graphics related items: Dynamic Systems Oxygen 402 - 4 processors on board with geometry setup. Intergrah TDZ 2000 - 2 PII 300Mhz + proprietary graphics boards Kinetix 3D studio Max 2 = $3495 "biggest 3D news this year." software (also see p.133, review of NT software) from that review, its easy to see why SGI is having trouble selling $50k graphics workstations, now that NT +PII300 is giving them a run for their money. I liked this issue of Byte (looking at Intel's new Merced) I recommend getting and reading it. BL