S3's OmniChrome and GammaChrome
I had some time to chat with one of the S3 product managers for their graphics business this morning, and he passed on some snippets of info on upcoming GammaChrome and OmniChrome products.OmniChrome is based on the desktop DeltaChrome S4 Nitro, with added functionality provided by an on-PCB TV-tuner and some on-ASIC parts like triple display DACs, to turn it into something you'd more likely recognise as an ATI All-In-Wonder product.
Pitched in at 9200 All-In-Wonder's price point but with claimed 9600 All-In-Wonder performance, the 128MB boards come bundled with a very slick looking Windows Media Centre clone that lets you manage your media and make use of the on-board functions.
With VIA recently cutting the cost of GPUs to their board partners and with close work with Club3D, S3 hope to get the OmniChrome out in its initial form as soon as possible. Loads of OmniChrome-equipped SFF PCs sit on VIA's stand as I type this, so production is working and it's ready to rock.
We'll be picking up a sample at IDF, so look forward to a review of the OmniChrome soon.
GammaChrome is S3's PCI Express part. Currently going through the validation stages, S3 will demo GammaChrome at IDF next week. They've cut partner pricing for that part too and they're hoping to get a bunch of boards based on GammaChrome out into the market to hopefully tie in when AMD platforms running PCI Express hit the market. The first GammaChrome boards will sport 256MB of memory and possibly run at clock speeds that differentiate from any AGP8X counterpart, in terms of performance.
It's not quite ready for press sampling yet, but as soon as it is we'll have a board in for reference testing.
Both GammaChrome and OmniChrome are 4-pipe DX9.0 parts. They don't exactly blaze a benchmark trail, but for the price point S3 stressed they were hoping to hit, things look decent.
