S3 Inc and its board-level customer Number Nine Visual Technology Corp issued a joint statement yesterday saying that their current relationship and business would not be affected by S3’s proposed acquisition of Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc on Tuesday (CI No 3,688). S3 is hoping to avoid all the problems chipmaker 3dfx Inc encountered with its existing board-level customers when it acquired boardmaker STB Systems Inc. Number Nine’s most recent family of accelerator cards, the SR9, uses S3’s Savage4 processor, and the Lexington, Massachusetts-based company says it has signed up IBM Corp to use the product. It claims more design wins are imminent.
But Number Nine, which almost went out of business last year, has been developing the non-PC side of its business recently. Workstation vendor Silicon Graphics Inc injected $9m in cash into the company in May 1998, and later converted into a 26% stake. SGI has been working with Number Nine on a flat panel solution pack that includes the monitor and Number Nine’s 32Mb Revolution IV-FP graphics card for both PCI and AGP systems.
