3DLABS Inc. Ltd. was a fabless semiconductor company. It was founded by Yavuz Ahıska and Osman Kent in 1994 with headquarters in San Jose, California.[1] It originally developed the GLINT and PERMEDIA[1] 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 became the Singapore-based ZiiLABS.
History
A Permedia 2 with 8 MB SGRAM AGP
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. It was itself acquired by Creative Labs in June 2002. In February 2006, 3Dlabs announced that it would stop developing professional 3D graphics 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.[2][3]
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. It claimed the new company was to offer processors and complete market-ready hardware and software platforms to consumer OEMs and ODMs.
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.
Graphics card listing
Dual Head Appian Graphics Jeronimo Pro (2× Permedia 2 – 2× 8 MB Oxygen 402 PCI with Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429FireGL 1000 PCI3Dlabs Oxygen ACX PCI
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.
