S3 SuperSavage MX/IX Mobile 3D Accelerator

Final Words: The Future

The SuperSavage's lifetime will be longer than a graphics accelerator in the high-performance desktop market segment, but it will still be no more than a year.  This also means that in less than a year, a replacement will have to be ready and shipping in production quantities to pick up the SuperSavage's duties. 

The obvious routes for advancement with the SuperSavage come with another die shrink, hopefully to 0.13-micron however more likely down to 0.15-micron.  With that die shrink will obviously come a higher clocked core, more power saving features, and maybe even more pipelines. 

The problem that S3 is going to run into here is that sooner or later, the competition in the mobile market is going to be much like the competition that existed in the desktop 3D accelerator arena not too long ago.  While the rules are a bit different in the mobile market, with power consumption and heat being much larger concerns, the outcome will inevitably be the same.  The market has the potential to be dominated by a handful of companies, forcing those that aren't able to keep up with the competition out of the market looking for other avenues for their products.

The key will be to see how S3 can use their joint venture with VIA to tie in some other technologies into this market, and they are definitely working on it.  Whether it is enough to compete with the market dominating NVIDIA or not is up for grabs and as usual, only time will tell.