New high-def S3 graphics processor announced
ESC 2008 seems hot this year, and S3 Graphics just announced its 65-nanometer 4300E graphics processor this morning.
The company claims that the 4300E outperforms its competition by as much as 30 percent, and is the only discrete high-performance HD video and graphics processor designed specifically to cope with "the rigid thermal requirements of the embedded industry." It's also compatible with Blu-ray and is Vista Premium certified.
The chip is designed for DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.1, incorporating a programmable video engine with acceleration for H.264, VC-1, AVS, DiVX and MPEG-2 HD. Connectability includes HDMI with HDCP, dual channel LVDS and dual-link DVI.
More from the press release below:
The S3 Graphics 4300E processor uses proven low leakage 65nm process technology and features an energy efficient multimedia architecture that scales from 300MHz to 600MHz. The graphics and HD video cores can be coupled with the latest DDR2 and DDR3 memories supporting up to 256MB of local graphics memory. The multimedia processor also incorporates a high speed serial link PCI Express 2.0 compliant bus supporting x1, x4, x8, and x16 lane widths, in addition to PCI Express ASPM for further reducing operational power to allow astonishingly low heat, fanless configurations.
The 4300E uses an advanced high quality programmable video core that is fully compatible with Microsoft's DirectX™ VA 2.0 media acceleration interface and Blu-ray™, supporting protected video playback from source to destination. Codec support includes WMV-9 HD, MPEG-2 HD, VC-1, H.264, DivX, and AVS.
The 4300E has built-in dual-link DVI/HDMI transmitters with HDCP and dual channel LVDS transmitters to interface to the latest high resolution standard and widescreen flat panels, in addition to two analog RAMDACS for CRT connectivity. Independent display rotation (900, 1800, 2700) with 2D, 3D, and HD media acceleration is also fully supported by the display pipeline.
The dev kit for the 4300E will be available in June.