3Dlabs

3DLABS Inc. Ltd.
Subsidiary of Creative Technology
Industry Semiconductors, electronics
Fate Acquired by Creative Technology and became ZiiLABS
Founded 1983
Products Media-rich application processors for Handheld and embedded devices
Website www.ziilabs.com, legacy graphics card support www.3dlabs.com

3DLABS was a fabless semiconductor company that originally developed the GLINT and PERMEDIA high-end graphics chip technology, that was used on many of the world's leading computer graphics cards in the CAD and DCC markets, including its own Wildcat and Oxygen cards.

In 2006 the company focused development efforts on its emerging media processing business and in 2009 rebranded as ZiiLABS.

History

A Permedia 2 with 8 MB SGRAM

3DLABS was formed from a management buy-out of Dupont Pixel Systems in the UK in April, 1994 and went public on Nasdaq in October, 1996. 3DLABS acquired Dynamic Pictures in July, 1998 and the Intense3D division of Intergraph in July, 2000 before being acquired by Creative Labs in June, 2002. In February, 2006, 3Dlabs announced that it would stop developing professional 3D graphic chips and focus on embedded and mobile media processors.

3DLABS was an early pioneer in bringing 3D graphics to the PC. Its GLINT 300SX graphics processor was the industry's first single chip, 3D-capable graphics device that was shipped on graphics boards from multiple vendors. Gamma was the first single chip graphics geometry processor for the PC. Permedia was the first low-cost OpenGL accelerator chip. 3Dlabs was a member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board and played an important role in the development of OpenGL 2.0 and ongoing evolution of the OpenGL API.

The new media processor business was developed out of the original UK R&D center with most of the workstation graphics teams that came from Intense3D and Dynamic Pictures having been hired by Intel and NVIDIA .

In November 2006 3DLABS introduced the DMS-02, its first media processor capable of 720P HD Video for portable devices. In January, 2009 the SoC team merged with a Creative product division and rebranded as ZiiLABS to offer processors and complete market-ready hardware and software platforms to consumer OEMs and ODMs.

In November 2012, Creative announced an agreement to sell the ZiiLabs subsidiary to Intel.

Media processors

The ZMS processors are based on a low-power multicore architecture including dual ARM cores for handling traditional CPU tasks plus a closely coupled, fully programmable SIMD array processor to do the heavy lifting for intensive media processing tasks such as; 2D graphics, 3D graphics, video decode/encode, image processing and floating point (32-bit IEEE). The processors integrate on-chip peripherals and interfaces suitable for a broad range of handheld and embedded devices.

Originally developed under the 3DLABS name, the processor related products are now sold and supported by ZiiLABS.

Legacy Graphics cards

Oxygen 402
FireGL 1000

These are the legacy cards supplied by 3DLABS. Drivers and limited support for these products can be found at: http://www.3dlabs.com/content/legacy/

Chips:

Boards:

Acquired with Intense3D:[19]

Acquired with Dynamic Pictures Inc.:

Before ATI acquired the FireGL team in 2001, Diamond Multimedia used 3Dlabs chipsets for some of their FireGL cards. Newer Technology sold the RenderPix cards based on the 500TX + Glint Delta for the Macintosh. Formac also made a number of Macintosh graphics cards using Permedia 1, 2, and 3 chipsets.

See also

References

  1. "3Dlabs Announces PERMEDIA 2 Graphics Processor for Low-cost 2D, 3D, Geometry and Video Acceleration". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on April 22, 1998.
  2. "GMX chipset specs". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on February 19, 1999.
  3. "Gamma chips specs". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on December 6, 1998.
  4. "DMX chipset specs". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on February 22, 1999.
  5. "3Dlabs Announces GLINT MX 3D Graphics Processor". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on April 22, 1998.
  6. "3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm User’s Guide" (PDF). 3Dlabs Inc.
  7. "Oxygen GVX420 specs". 3Dlabs Inc.
  8. "Oxygen GVX1 Pro specs". 3Dlabs Inc.
  9. "Oxygen GVX210 specs". 3Dlabs Inc.
  10. "Oxygen GVX1 specs". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on February 8, 2001.
  11. "Oxygen VX1 specs". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on February 8, 2001.
  12. "Oxygen VX1-16 specs". 3Dlabs Inc.
  13. "Oxygen VX1 Stereo specs". 3Dlabs Inc.
  14. "Oxygen VX1 1600SW specs". 3Dlabs Inc.
  15. "Permedia3 Create! specs". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on February 8, 2001.
  16. "Oxygen GMX specs". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on October 18, 2000.
  17. "Oxygen RPM specs". 3Dlabs Inc. Archived from the original on April 27, 1999.
  18. "Oxygen ACX specs". 3Dlabs Inc.
  19. "Intergraph graphics support". Intergraph.
  20. "Oxygen Family Specs". Dynamic Pictures Inc. Archived from the original on February 7, 1998.
  21. "Dynamic Pictures' Next-Generation Accelerator Fuels Workastation-Class 3D Graphics on PCs". Dynamic Pictures Inc. Archived from the original on February 7, 1998.
  22. "Dynamic Pictures Unveils Oxygen(TM) 3D Graphics Accelerator Family". Dynamic Pictures Inc. Archived from the original on February 7, 1998.
  23. "Dynamic Pictures Announces Availability of Oxygen 402 the Industry's First Quad-Processor Graphics Accelerator". Dynamic Pictures Inc. Archived from the original on February 7, 1998.
  24. Blair MacIntyre. "PC 3D Graphics Accelerators FAQ - B10 Dynamic Pictures V192".

External links

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