S3's products are often interesting, but still year after year have fallen by the wayside as the titans Intel, Nvidia and ATI have conquered the market. In the past few years, their Chrome GPUs have been pitched as ideal embedded solutions, though they are still having issues with adoption.
That might get a chance to change, with S3 claiming they will have a DirectX 10 compatible GPU before the end of the year. With their new Chrome 4 series, based on a 90nm or 65nm process, S3 claims they will have HDMI, HDCP and DX10 support:
The new S3 Graphics Chrome 4 lineup will consist of two chips: the Chrome 460, which is projected to be made using 90nm process technology and is fully compatible with DirectX 10, as well as the Chrome 430, which is expected to be manufactured using 65nm fabrication technology and is clamed to support DirectX 10.1 specification.
They are obviously not aiming at the performance arena, with these cards featuring a PCI Express 1.0 interface.
However, they do have a good advantage here if they manage to pull it off - a chipset that is low-power and easy to integrate, also sporting DX10 compatibility, will be ideal for someone building a media center or other embedded PC that relies on Windows Vista.