Acer Labs Inc (ALI) is aggressively targeting the high end of the emerging integrated graphics chipset market, through a deal with ArtX Inc. The California graphics chip designer will work with the chipset manufacturer to produce a chipset for the high end of the PC market, a sector not catered for by current or forthcoming products from Intel Corp, Silicon Integrated Systems Corp, S3-Via Inc or ALI itself, through its tie-up with Nvidia Corp.
The deal with ArtX – which is providing Nintendo Co with the graphics engine for its upcoming Dolphin console – should give ALI a product that rivals all the current ‘buzz’ chips in the graphics market – Sony’s Emotion Engine, Nvidia’s GeForce 256 and 3Dfx Interactive Inc’s Napalm/Voodoo 4 chip. Acer’s work, and the other deals that are occurring between chip infrastructure manufacturers and graphics companies, call into question the future of the 3D graphics chip as a standalone product.
The chip set, known as the Aladdin 7, will be an Acer product, with a 128-bit graphics bus, a geometry engine and the power to plot 12.5 million triangles per second, according to the EE Times. The chipset will use a Socket 7 connection – compliant with some Pentium CPUs and the K6 chip family from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Acer’s deal with Nvidia involves using the Riva TNT2 technology in a Socket 370 chipset for Celeron-based PCs. The Aladdin 7 is sampling now and will go into volume production next quarter, at $32 each in quantities of 10,000. รก
