Last gasp, part 2
By Brian Dipert, Technical Editor -- EDN, February 3, 2000
As I noted in my last column, the too-little, too-late bug has bitten two companies: NeoMagic (www.neomagic.com) and 3dfx. Read about 3dfx's woes in "Last gasp of the graphics dinosaurs?"EDN, Dec 23, 1999, pg 40. Now to NeoMagic. Its less-than $40 (100,000) MagicMedia 256XLs, for all intents and purposes, 1998's 256AV with a larger embedded frame buffer and a few 3-D features. A 6-Mbyte memory array is barely adequate in this era of XGA-and-larger resolutions, 32-bit color and dual-simultaneous displays and, for 3-D graphics, high-precision Z buffers and large amounts of textures. Because the 256XL+'s memory array is on the same die as the graphics logic, the device arguably consumes less power, generates less EMI, and supports a wider, potentially higher performance data bus than the off-die alternatives that such companies as ATI Technologies, S3, and Silicon Motion tout (www.atitech.com, www.s3.com, www.siliconmotion.com). However, NeoMagic's board-space-savings arguments are losing their punch in the era of multidie single-chip packaging, and the company's competitors can obtain their memory from a variety of suppliers and aren't handcuffed by foundry-specific designs.
NeoMagic's 256XL+ also reopens the debate about when robust 3-D hardware acceleration makes sense in mobile computing. NeoMagic claims that users, primarily businesspeople, of the $1500 to $3000 notebook PCs the 256XL+ targets will rarely, if ever, run a 3-D-enabled application, so devoting transistors to the embedded-memory array makes more sense. A quick survey of the game-filled computer displays on your next airplane flight might, however, lead you to a different conclusion, and NeoMagic's stance ignores the increasing sales of notebook PCs to homes and schools. The lack of a triangle-setup engine is a curious omission that harks back to the pseudo-3-D desktop-PC chips of years past. The 256XL+'s 3-D features pale in comparison with admittedly more expensive chips, such as ATI's recently announced Rage Mobility 128. This market struggle will be interesting to watch, especially for those of you pondering the viability of your own system-on-chip projects.
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Contact Technical Editor Brian Dipert at bdipert@pacbell.net.
