Recently I had the pleasure of talking
to Nadeem Mohammad of S3 Graphics, and Keith Kowal of VIA
Technologies, regarding a new product line being unveiled
today, coupling VIA chipsets with S3 video technology. Along
with covering the product brief, we also discussed
interesting features particular to the new lineup and talked
about future expansion of the line. S3 has implemented some
things wanted very greatly by the market, from embedded
designs to media machines and even desktop users, and put
them into their newest series, the S3 ChromeS20 family.
Initially, the ChromeS20 series will
consist of two cards, being released initially this week in
China. Over the phone, Keith mentioned that releases for the
U.S., Europe and Canada are set to occur soon, though he
could not give a confirmed date. Whether this is from supply
concerns or market concerns, he mentioned that we will
probably see these products in the west during the month of
November as well. The products are the ChromeS25 and the
ChromeS27.
S3 earned somewhat of a bad reputation
about being a vendor that offered a "low-end" product.
Comparably nVidia, ATI (or even 3dfx back in the day) were
always a step ahead, delegating S3 standalone cards to entry
level and rarely beyond. Where S3 eventually did a fantastic
job was in the embedded market - motherboards having or
environments requiring embedded graphics, such as media
machines, servers, low-power or quiet devices, etc.
The release of the Unichrome
architecture a while back made S3 interesting again. Having
built many embedded machines using Unichrome technology, I
was often satisfied with the results. VIA is another company
that has become very popular for their low-power devices in
the successors to the C3, and more recently their chipsets
for Mini ITX boards. It seems now that S3 has taken the
experience in embedded computing and are trying to bring it
out into the mainstream. Overall, these first two releases
are looking promising. How do they stack up? Only time will
tell, but on paper they look impressive.
I'll be covering five key areas here:
environment, features & performance, scalability, power over
performance, and price.
Environment
By environment, we are looking at the
green and embedded community. The last thing I need in my
media machine under my TV is a sweaty GPU requiring noisy
fans or huge heat pipes. It needs to be quiet, cool, and
performance decently enough to do fast DVD and movie
playback.
The new Chrome S GPUs were developed in
part with technology from Fujitsu, which has allowed S3 to
bring a card that is already low on heat and power
consumption. On top of that, they maintain a low transistor
count for the GPU as a whole - not fantastic for
performance, but very good on the heat generated, both
during load and when idle; even at high clock rates, with 50
to 70 million transistors for the GPU.
The power dissipation for the cards
looks good, too. The ChromeS27 under load dissipates about
11.6W, lower than that of the GeForce Go 6600 U. This is the
GPU only, however, and so overall dissipation will be higher
than this figure. The lower-clocked version of the card
(S25) is expected to dissipate as little as 9W of power. In
a laptop scenario that is optimal and the same GPU is found
in the desktop varieties as well.
ChromeS25 typical power output: 15 -
30W
ChromeS27 typical power output: 17 -
30W
Previously, the low-power series of S3
cards were found only as embedded devices. The idea of
having a mobile GPU in a desktop platform is novel. Often, a
desktop user will put a mobile CPU into a desktop board for
overclocking, heat or noise purposes. The same idea can be
put into use with a videocard in this scenario. With all the
reference cards coming with passive heatsinks, you could
pick one up off the shelf to build without worries of heat
buildup.
