S3 Dual-GPU Card Competes with ATI Eyefinity
VIA Technologies plans to offer an alternative to AMD's ATI Eyefinity technology.
VIA Technologies said that it's sporting a few products at the Digital Signage Expo 2010 trade show held next week at the Las Vegas Convention Center. One of the products mentioned is the company's upcoming S3 Graphics Chrome 5400E x2, a dual-GPU graphics card aimed to take on AMD's ATI Eyefinity technology.
"The S3 Graphics 5400E x2 is a highly integrated and flexible video card that features dual graphics and multimedia processors," the company said. "Boasting extreme hardware acceleration of the latest HD video codecs, the S3 Graphics 5400E x2 uses S3 Graphics' PanoChrome technology to provide up to four independent HD video streams at resolutions of 1080p on up to eight displays, employing a variety of display modes and configurations."
The company's press release provided a few more details, indicating that the card provides built-in Genlock support for synchronized source timing, and support for Span, Extended, and Clone view configurations. The hardware-accelerated HD video codecs include H.264, VC-1 and WMV-HD. Unfortunately, there's no real hardware-based info such as its core clock speed and on-board memory amount.
VIA said that it will offer a taste of the dual-GPU graphics card during the show, and will eventually provide samples to ODM customers in the USA sometime Q2 2010 or later. More information about what VIA is bringing to the trade show next week can be seen here.

Now I can play dungeon hack on 4 displays! YAY
It's certainly not a Larabee statement and it probably means nothing to enthusiasts or gamers, however it may offer an alternative to the super-multitasker and office jocks.
Lets get this competition going, bring it on!
the more the merrier
Agreed, but it would be cool to have another player in the market.
They probably are aiming at the productivity sector. You know, everything BUT gaming.
LOLLLLLL... sorry couldn't help it...
VC-1 and WMV-HD are the exact same thing.
VC-1 is the underlying codec. WMV-HD is a branding name used by Microsoft on HD resolution .wmv files that use the VC-1 codec.
No more Crysis please
However, if they can make a card that is inexpensive, handles tons of displays, AND can handle full high-def decoding, they'll have themselves a market. Even better if it makes do with passive cooling. If it did all that, anything under, say, $150US would make it drool-inducing.
'course, I'll grant that S3 will likely fail to deliver on those daydreams; making good non-gamer cards seems to be almost exclusively Matrox's forté, with S3 mostly producing half-arsed stuff. But I guess we'll see.
Sad to see that though they try, there's not a damned thing Via makes worth buying...