14 DAY TRIAL // The market for computer graphics is currently dominated by three leading companies, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel. While the first two compete in the desktop GPU segment, all three can provide integrated graphics solutions. However, there are other players in this growing market, such as S3 Graphics, a company that has announced today the debut of its new Chrome 5400E embedded graphics processor, designed with a native OpenCL 1.0 engine and support for the latest operating systems, including Microsoft's recently launched Windows 7 OS.
According to the chip maker, the new 5400E architecture has been designed to provide support for DirectX 10.1 graphics and has been featured with a Shader Model 4.1, OpenGL 3.1 and Openl CL 1.0. The GPU is designed on a 65nm process technology and can support a number of memory configurations, including DDR2, GDDR3 and gDDR3, with the latter operating at 1.50V, consequently delivering a reduced power consumption when compared with GDDR3 and DDR2 standards, which operate at 1.8V.
The new graphics solution offers support for H.264, MPEG-4/2, and VC-1 hardware acceleration, with the help of the built-in ChromotionHD 2.1 video engine, which is fully compatible with Microsoft DirectX-VA 2.0 media acceleration. In addition, the Chrome 5400E embedded GPU also comes with an integrated DisplayPort transmitter, two dual-link DVI transmitters, with integrated HDMI (including support for 7.1 HD audio) and HDCP, and integrated dual-channel LVDS transmitter.
S3's new graphics solution comes with driver support for both Windows Vista and the latest Windows 7, as well as other operating systems, such as Windows XP, and CE.Linux kernel 2.6.xx with support for RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Debian, and other Linux distributions. Unfortunately there's no word on pricing and availability details, but this product is designed for the embedded market, which means you won't be seeing it on the shelves of your local hardware retailer.