Posted on Monday, November 27 2006 @ 1:11 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
New roadmaps from S3
reveal the company is working on DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware. S3 is skipping DirectX 9.0c to move directly to Shader Model 4.0 and DX10 and 10.1.
DirectX 10.1
Since DX10.1 isn't going to appear before the end of 2007, S3 is pitching its DX10.1 chips for first and second half of 2008, so we're talking about parts which will come out in two years timeframe. All of the DX10.1 products are using 65nm manufacturing process and PCIe Gen2 interface.
Under the codename XE3/E3, S3 is developing a dual-core GPU with 1.2 GHz clock (per core), but this GPU will be plugged in PCIe Gen2 boards. Memory controller is simplified, dual-channel 128-bit controller with support for DDR3, GDDR-3/4 and GDDR-5 memory. Video engine is called Chromotion 5.0, and it features hardware support for new codec's for encoding video for handhelds.
