You probably should have mentioned that S3 was bought out by VIA a long time ago. These cards, although coming from a poor background, should come into play nicely with VIA's new Isaiah platform. Also, with S3's background in 24 bit sound, there should be no reason to have integrated HD sound on their new chipsets.

VIA has taken an innovative stance on platforms and claims that the draw to low-power computing should favor them since they have 2 CPUs ( 1 current and 1 upcomming) on the same socket, making them a better choice sooner than the other comparable solutions from AMD and Intel. Apparently VIA assumes that the other solutions will be aimed at the C7, something they are already gaining market-share for and expanding on.

I'm not picking a pony, but it should be interesting to see if the underdog can gain any profitable market-share and possibly help bring new ideas into the market.

"More competition brings more benefit to the comsumer."

'and are said to deliver HD DVD playback "at the highest performance-per-watt ratio ever." '

Ok... but HD-DVD is dead. What about Blue Ray.

sounds interesting any benchmarks show up yet?