Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 64MB - KYRO II (3/15)

The Market

So why would Hercules be interested in producing a Kyro II based board? This is bound to lead to friction with NVIDIA. From Hercules' perspective, that decision is easily explained: NVIDIA is currently a quasi-monopolist. Companies that want to produce boards built around an NVIDIA chip are forced to buy the memory from NVIDIA as well. It's even gotten to the point where NVIDIA reserves the right to influence the way the retail box that you see on the shelves of your hardware store will look. Due to the high and rising prices of 3D chips and memory, margins in this saturated and very competitive (read = hostile) market are slim. The Kyro II offers Hercules' a chance to escape from this deadlock. The chip, designed by Imagination Technologies (owner of Power VR and Videologic), is relatively inexpensive and is manufactured by the number 6 chipmaker in the world (ST Microelectronics), so there should be no reason to worry about production capacities. ST has experience fabbing chips for other companies, having already produced chips for AMD and being the foundry of choice for the RIVA 128 for NVIDIA. Hercules is by no means going to be the sole retailer offering a Kyro II based board. Videologic is also planning a card, which will most probably not be able to compete with Hercules' board either in market presence and penetration or price (around DM 350 for a 32MB TV-Out version - The Prophet 4500 costs DM 330,- (149$)). Since Hercules will pay Videologic a small licensing fee for every board sold, Videologic is no doubt very happy to have found this strong new ally.

The question remains - how will NVIDIA react to this? The staff at Hercules claims not to be worried, emphasizing that the company has been an NVIDIA partner for quite a while now and is interested in continuing to sell NVIDIA boards. However, Hercules is not planning any boards based on the new 200 and 400 versions of the popular GeForce 2 MX chip, since this is the market segment the 3D Prophet 4500 is targeted at and Hercules wants to concentrate its efforts on this board. Meanwhile, the competition is watching with great interest, holding its breath to see what will happen next.

Copyright: 09.04.2001 -   RIVA Station 2001 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

Translation by Benjamin Kraft

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