Tuesday, June 12th 2012
HTC to Complete Acquisition of S3 Graphics
S3 Graphics' future hung in the balance since June 2011, when its parent company VIA Technologies announced sale of its stake in it. Since then, it's been a word on the wires, that smartphone maker HTC has been in the fray to buy it out, since it is facing IP turbulence with Apple. HTC and Apple used S3 Graphics (September 2011) and AMD (November 2011), respectively, as proxies in their patent infringement battles. It emerged out of the patent spat, that S3 Graphics holds a handy bouquet of graphics IP, and HTC announced that it is now back on track to acquire it.
Smartphone giant HTC backed S3 Graphics' claims to certain graphics-related patents in the patent infringement case against Apple. "We think S3's patent portfolio is valid and strong, and we have decided to complete the purchase of S3 after cautious assessment," HTC's general counsel Grace Lei said, at an annual shareholders' general meeting. S3 Graphics currently owns about 270 patents, some of which are licensed to Sony Corp., Nintendo Co. and Microsoft Corp., Lei added.
Source:
Focus Taiwan
Smartphone giant HTC backed S3 Graphics' claims to certain graphics-related patents in the patent infringement case against Apple. "We think S3's patent portfolio is valid and strong, and we have decided to complete the purchase of S3 after cautious assessment," HTC's general counsel Grace Lei said, at an annual shareholders' general meeting. S3 Graphics currently owns about 270 patents, some of which are licensed to Sony Corp., Nintendo Co. and Microsoft Corp., Lei added.
23 Comments on HTC to Complete Acquisition of S3 Graphics
Most of what i see on their site are mainly suited for industrial use or low to really low end consumer systems.
Probably never going to happen as they most likely already make enough money licensing out their patents/tech
It is possible to have too many though - when you have many similar sized firms all competing with each other, the reduced rate of progress caused by smaller R&D departments can actually undo any benefit from the increased competition.
Also, the PC graphics sector isn't particularly tempting to muscle in on right now. Increasingly excellent integrated graphics will continue to erode the market for low-end chips, and in the gaming and high-end sectors Nvidia and AMD are extremely tough competition, with their massive R&D, experience, reputation, patent portfolios (pains me to say that one) and links in the industry (e.g. TSMC loyalty, AIB partners etc.).
"WTI is a private investment company, in which VIA Technologies chairman Cher Wang is a significant shareholder. Update: Wang also co-founded HTC, by the way"
The latest Chrome chips were not bad, they just needed some more advertising which they had none at all.
I think they would do well if they focused on efficiency
VIA will soon release the VX11 chipset with a DX11 IGP core from S3.
What this means is that HTC will start using their PowerVR IP to differentiate themselves from Apple, Samsung, and the rest. Samsung has been doing fairly well with ARM's Mali 400 for the past generation and a half, so I'm assuming they'll stick with them. LG tends to use Qualcomm and Nvidia SoCs, so they're not particularly interesting here either.
The two big unknowns I see are Motorola (and anyone else that uses TI's OMAP application processors), and Apple. Both relied heavily on PowerVR graphics in the past, and both are direct competitors to HTC. I assume HTC and Motorola will work out some sort of cross licensing agreement, but I'm not sure if Apple will be willing to. If they don't, I'm guessing Apple will start using the same Mali graphics in recent Samsung flagships, or possibly start buying complete Qualcomm SoCs with Adreno graphics. The first option is the one I think is more likely, as well as more interesting.
If Apple does end up going with ARM's GPU, it's going to be going back to the days of the iPhone 4 and Galaxy S, where Apple and Samsung had almost identical hardware, but with very different software to distinguish them. Now that iOS is looking more and more like Android, and TouchWiz is looking more and more like iOS, and Android is rapidly approaching iOS-level smoothness, there really isn't going to be that much separating Samsung from Apple. That's an outcome Apple won't tolerate, so we will be able to count on something big coming from Apple in the near future (much bigger than Siri, which no one uses for more than a day and had already existed in a similar form on both Android and iOS for ages). What this big thing could be, I have no idea, but I'm eager to see.
Of course, this is all just idle speculation, but I do so enjoy speculating.
Still, this was one of the funniest posts I've read this year.