A new 6600 fighterJoining the fray in the quest for top dog in the very popular low mid-range segment comes the new S20 Chrome from S3. The card was launched officially in China today, though the card is supposed to be available in North America this month.
S3's product design approach is very different form what we see from ATI and Nvidia today. The 90 nm graphics chips S27 and S25 integrate only "50-70 million" processors - which compares to the 300+ million in the most recent ATI and Nvidia processors. The flagship model S27 runs at a clock speed of 700 MHz, the highest currently available on the market. The clock speed does not automatically translate in industry leading performance, as the S27 targets Nvidia's GeForce 6600 class of graphics cards and ATI's X1300 Pro as main competition. The S27 will outpace both competitors, depending on the benchmark by at least 10 and as much as 50 percent.The selling point of the S20 series however is not really performance, but much more performance per watt, a discipline that typically is not important in the enthusiast desktop graphics space. Via says that the GPU will consume 11.6 watts, which is less than half of Nvidia's mobile 6600 part - according to S3. To our knowledge, Nvidia's mobile 6600 consumes 18 watts - still substantially more than the S27. The entry-level S25 chip, which runs at "more than" 600 MHz, consumes less than 10 watts, the company said. One secret of the low power consumption of the graphics processor comes from the integration of Transmeta' Longrun 2 technology that S3 was able to access through a partnership with Fujitsu. Longrun, originally developed for the Crusoe processor, has been licensed by Fujitsu.
The company will also be unveiling a new Multi chrome feature which will allow users to use two S20 cards in an SLI-like configuration. The Inquirer has some information on this:
One other nifty thing they do is run in a dongle-free SLI-type two card mode called MultiChrome. The nice thing about it is S3 has no proprietary turf to defend, so you can use it on just about anything that supports two PCIe slots. In fact, you can use it in as many slots as you have, but I am told somewhat off the record that after three cards, the performance doesn't increase enough to be worth it.Last week, at the secret S3 fortress in the glaciated peaks outside of San Jose, I got to see it in action. I can say that it runs 3DMark05 just fine in dual card mode, and gets a bit less than 2x the single card speed. The performance is not stunning, but with a single card, you can play most cutting edge games at 1024*768. With two cards, 1280*1024 should be quite doable and fast.
If S3 can get these on store shelves, this will definitely provide interesting competition to what Nvidia and ATI have to offer, despite their dominance thus far.
Article Link: S3 tackles entry-level, mainstream graphics market in North America
