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

To: Simon Cardinale who wrote (7026)	9/9/1998 10:42:00 PM
From: Waldeen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Simon, Thanks for the discussion of SLI! To me basically SLI is the first hint that the video designers are realizing that Graphics are "inherently parallel". Inherently parallel means that each 'processor' addition increases the speed up proportionally. Patrick hit on in his previous post. Lots of tasks are not inherently parallel, and the speed-up decreases as processors increase. The region-based rendering versus immediate based rendering as Sellers talks about in his latest interview posted here seems to me to be a bottle neck though. So it appears that SLI to me above a few processors is going to start being rendering limited? This is speculation on my part and would have to be answered by others. Yes, think SLI Banshee would have quite an impact. Am desperately wanting to know if the 3dfx roadmap includes such a thing! There's a lot of technology issues touched on by this thread and then there are investment issues. SLI Banshee falls clearly as an investment issue to me, as this company has already demonstrated the technology with V2. I do top down investing, and look for where the future is going and eliminate any companies that don't have the tools. IMO with the graphics companies lowering their chips to commodity prices, graphics will be "parallel" very soon. The chips are getting cheap enough to include more than one per board and in so doing possibly increase sales volume enough to compensate for the declining margins in this business. Maybe. This may or may not be a correct interpretation of the future of this business. But applying it leaves only two companies that could possibly stumble in the right direction: 3dfx and Nvidia with Twin Texels (TNT) which is essentially a parallel approach. Keeps me totally out of investing in SIII and frankly looks to me as if ATY is going to look like SIII in a year if they don't feed their pipeline of future products properly. There is still a lot of potential market share for 3dfx with Banshee, and if played right could be more than most think today IMO. thanks for your response, Waldeen

To: Simon Cardinale who wrote (7026)	9/9/1998 10:53:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 16960

You are technicallly right. As far as I or many other people are concerned though, SLI means that I don't waste my existing card and/or can improve it by buying another one. I read somewhere that someone has come up with a way to get TNT and Banshee work together. Now if Banshee can work with TNT, wouldn't it stand to reason that 3Dfx could make it work so much better with their own product lines. I don't buy the arguement that "I don't want one of my products to steal sales from the other one". One way or another you are going to face competition and advance technology. You might as well get that competition from yourself rather than another company. This discussion was really about marketing rather than technology. So if 3Dfx really made Banshee for OEM and could not have cared less about marketing it to retail channel, then why the OEMs have not lined up in hordes to buy into Banshee? I hear that OEM decisions are made in advance of chip productions and that Banshee is now in full production. Yet only one OEM has agreed to use Banshee and two others are just debating if they should buy into it. I consider this a serious marketing flop. If they had done their job right, some OEMs and card makers would simply trust that whatever comes from 3Dfx is worth carrying and would have announced support for Banshee way before it was even a prototype. Not to mention that time to production sucked; If they'd come up with Banshee 4~6 weeks sooner they'd catch the back-to-school market. Since they missed on that opportunity, they may as well have taken another few weeks and improved on it for the Christmas season. Sun Tzu