S3 Graphics, a leading provider of graphics and HD Multimedia technologies, today announced the availability of S3FotoPro, a GPGPU application using the latest programmable architecture powered by the Chrome 400 Series GPUs. Utilizing an array of S3 stream processors, the GPUs can accelerate parallel data workloads and perform work on thousands of concurrent threads to achieve Gigaflops (GFLOPS) of high-throughput computations.

S3FotoPro is an example of a computationally expensive process for image quality improvements that is best achieved on a GPU instead of a CPU due to the S3 stream processor architecture. The algorithm complexity and high calculation requirements required by S3FotoPro enables the parallel workload speedup to be magnitudes (>100x) of times faster than the latest CPUs in the market today. In addition, the GFLOPS-per-Watt and GFLOPS-per-Dollar favor the GPU computational efficiency over standard CPU calculations.

On September the 3rd, Google released a beta version of its upcoming Chrome web-browser software. The beta was released at 3:02 PM EDT and it captured 0.5% of the browser market share in just 2 hours of release. What's more, by the end of 9 hours since launch, the browser had already captured 1% of the market. Net Applications found that value to fluctuate but the browser currently is looking above the 1% mark. Data was collected studying the browser's ID:

Official Build 1583
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

The numbers are mind-boggling. Considering there are about 1.46 Billion internet users, 1% should take at least 14 million users to keep that value. In other terms, the number of times Chrome beta may have been downloaded looks threatening to Mozilla. It wouldn't be too far sighted to think Google Chrome could challenge Mozilla's world record when (or if) a stable release does come out (G-Mail is still beta). The browser has received a largely positive response albeit issues concerning its privacy policy, where irregularities were noted. All in all, Google did manage to make heads turn.

S3 Graphics, a leading provider of graphics and visualization technologies, today announced its latest S3 Graphics Chrome 440 GTX desktop cards. Boards are now available at online retail affiliate GStore, with future shipments by key European partners in addition to multiple retail partners in Asia.

S3 Graphics today informed that the S3 Graphics Chrome 430 GT desktop cards, are now available at online retail affiliate GStore. Engineered to be the first S3 graphics solution to deliver full DirectX 10.1 support, the 65nm-built Chrome 430 GT GPU is clocked at 625MHz while the 256MB of GDDR2 memory is set to work at 500MHz. Moreover the card supports the PCI Express 2.0 graphics card specification, plus D-SUB and DVI (with HDCP) connectivity. "S3 Graphics has once again delivered an outstanding product, leveraging our graphics, video, and power savings core competencies," said Dr. Ken Weng, GM for S3 Graphics. "The feature-rich Chrome 430 GT challenges the current discrete graphics landscape, bringing new functionalities previously seen only on high end desktops, bringing new meaning to the terms 'affordable gaming' and 'home entertainment'."

Unfortunately there aren't many technical specifications, but a couple of pictures of S3 Graphics' new Destination 2 (D2) and Destination 3 (D3) graphics processors have been leaked onto the internet. All that is really known about them at present is that they will support DirectX 10, with D2 (shown on the left of the first image below) being manufactured using a 90nm process and D3 (right of the first image and shown in the second image) manufactured using a 65nm process. Both chips will be manufactured by Fujitsu, with graphics cards using D2 being called Chrome 450 and 460 and cards equipped with D3 called Chrome 430 and 440. Apparently HP has already ordered some of the D2 chips, which are essentially ready to be launched, whilst the D3 chips are still in the process of driver testing.