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

To: Don Earl who wrote (12679)	2/1/1999 8:48:00 AM
From: mark doubiago	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14577

Diamond Win biz.yahoo.com

To: Don Earl who wrote (12679)	2/1/1999 6:24:00 PM
From: Synapsid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14577

I believe memory chips may be coming to S3's rescue. Depending on how the SDRAM market develops, this may be a bigger issue than x4 AGP as a "killer feature" from a board manufacturing perspective (the kind of thing that makes design wins happen). The Savage4 supports 64Mbit SDRAMs (8 MBytes a piece). Using commodity 4Mx16 SDRAMs (the same configuration as used on 32MB DIMM modules), the chip can support a memory configuration of 32MB using only 4 of these commodity memory chips. This follows from the fact that the Savage4 is still using a 64-bit memory interface. True 128-bit architectures like the RIVA TNT and Voodoo3 would need 2Mx32 SDRAMs to achieve the same configuration. 4Mx16 is likely to be cheaper than 2Mx32. But the biggest competitive advantage exists with 16MB configurations. The Savage4 can use just two 2Mx32 memory chips. This compares to 8 16Mbit chips used in boards with a true 128-bit memory architecture (RIVA TNT, 3Dfx Banshee/Voodoo3). What it all comes down to is that a 16MB Savage4 board uses 2 memory chips, while a 16MB NVIDIA or 3DFx board requires 8 chips that have a higher cost per megabyte. A similar kind of situation was going on last year. The main reason why everyone was coming out with 16MB configurations with the Banshee and RIVA TNT is that 16MB was the only configuration that allowed the use of commodity 16Mbit SDRAMs, which were much cheaper than SGRAMs. As you might remember, this surprised the hell out of S3 (it also hit STB with NVIDIA's RIVA 128 at the time). The memory market is very dynamic, so this is not guaranteed to be a big advantage for S3, but it does seem likely to me. By the way, the fact that S3 is using a 64-bit memory interface compared to competitor's 128-bit interface does mean that the Savage4 has considerably less "memory horsepower" than competitor's chips. It tries to make up for this with efficient AGP texturing and texture compression. This may be bottleneck though for high-resolution truecolor rendering, which doubles the amount of memory bandwidth required. S3 may claim that truecolor rendering is almost free, but at higher resolutions it will cause problems.