Sunnyvale multimedia chip designer S3 Inc is getting all the mileage it can out of news that Compaq Computer Corp is including its new chip set in its future Compaq Presario personal computers. The S3 set is claimed to bring television quality video, Compact Disk-quality audio and high-performance graphics to the user at affordable prices – adding $100 to the price of a Compaq Presario home computer. About half of Compaq’s Presario models will offer the chips in time for the 1995 holiday buying season, and they will be in all Presarios by the end of next year. The secret of the chip set is the S3 Co-operative Accelerator Architecture, claimed to be the first graphics, audio and MPEG chip set that can go onto the motherboard rather than requiring a separate board; it also supports the DirectDraw feature set from Windows95. It puts up full-screen 30 frames per second live video or MPEG video, CD-quality audio, broadcast-quality special effects and high-performance two-dimensional graphics acceleration. As well as going on the motherboard, S3 sees it being put onto upgrade daughterboards costing $100, and add-in boards for $250. The Co-operative Accelerator Architecture partitions the graphics and video acceleration, MPEG acceleration and audio functions to work in conjunction with current processors to maximise performance and minimise cost. The Architecture consists of S3 Trio64V+ 64-bit, dynamic RAM-based digital video-enabled integrated graphics and video accelerator, using S3’s Streams Processor, which combines video and graphics on the fly; the S3 Scenic Highway interface to support bi-directional data transfer between the Trio64V+ and the S3 Scenic/MX2 MPEG audio and video accelerator; the Scenic/MX1 PCI and S3 Scenic/MX2 audio-video MPEG-1 decoder accelerators; and Sonic/AD programmable sigma-delta audio digital-to-analogue converter. It is a three-chip set and delivers 24-bit colour with 16.7m shades, bi-linear scaling up to full-screen and hardware-assisted synchronisation of audio and video. Samples of the S3 set are available now with volume next quarter. The S3 Trio64V+ is $32 for 10,000-up, Scenic/MX1 and the Scenic/MX2 are $35 for 10,000-up and the S3 Sonic/AD is $3.85 for 10,000-up. The set is seen as posing a serious threat to manufacturers of higher-priced video and sound boards, making the economics of their business problematical.
