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Technology Stocks : ATI Technologies in 1997 (T.ATY) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sleeperz who wrote (2684)	2/5/1999 2:36:00 PM
From: NTT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5927

If memory serves me correct they bought them out for a paltry $1.5M. I could be totally wrong here, so hopefully someone can confirm this. They made considerably more than this with their financing deal with Intel. Of course S3 management were brilliant with this acquisition and I applaud them because it seems nobody else saw the potential of the patents. Other than the patents, Exponential really had nothing to offer. >1) The Savage 4 does have 4X AGP, WILL have AGP 4x, not does have. So will everyone else. >2) if they can pull off true single pass trilinear not like the TNT. The TNT does do single pass trilinear already. So does R128. >3) same chip supports Flat Panel Displays, Good for S3 Nice feature. V3, TNT2 and the others also have this support though. >4) As Far as CPU utulization during DVD, well thats not a real >problem, Intel likes the solution, Buy a faster Pentium chip. Given that they are trying to sell this as a cheap performance part, it is not going into the high end machines. As such, they are still going to have a CPU issue. >5) the S4 does support an 8-bit stencil buffer which you were unsure of. Thanks for confirming. What about 32bit Z, hardware bump mapping, specular lighting, gloss mapping, HDTV capable overlay, iDCT engine and some of the other features that the R128 has? >6)Full Software Support Does anyone even use Win3.1 anymore? ATI still does have 3.1 drivers. In any case, S3's software support has always been very marginal in the past. We'll see how they do with their new chipset. Given that they've laid off so many people recently I can't see this situation improving. >7) Additional Features > 300MHz RAMDAC with gamma correction All new chipsets are going to have this. Some have already announced. > I2C serial bus and flash ROM support !! Upgradable????? I think everyone has supported I2C for a long time. Even the RageII has it. Flash ROM. That's nice, but expensive for them. I guess their ROM's are not in a finished state otherwise they wouldn't have this. > ACPI and PCI power management Everyone already does this. > Hardware and BIOS support for VESA timings and DDC monitor >communications Everyone already does this as well. > PCI 2.2 bus support including bus mastering Everyone already supports 2.1 and will support 2.2. In other words, my point is that yes the Savage4 might seem like it has some 'advanced' features like AGP 4x, but look at the timeframe that it's coming out at. All of the other manufacturers will have the same features implemented by then as well. So where is S3's advantage? >But as you say the Savage 4 is almost feature Identical to the RAGE >128 and has the advantage of being cheaper US$25 vs US$30-35?. By the time the S4 is available, ATI will have released at least one new chipset and the Rage128's will be going for $15 as the economy parts. We'll compare prices when S4 actually has a product ready to release.