The Last Wild One of S3 and the Pentium Rebirth (PCGH Retro, June 03)

…2002: Savage 3D, Savage 4, Savage 2000 – the previous 3D graphics chips from S3 could never really hold their own against the competition from 3dfx, Ati and Nvidia, they always came onto the market too late and with immature drivers. For example, the S3 chips, whose English name means “wild”, could almost only be used for office programs, but not for complex 3D games. Therefore, after the last failure with the Savage 2000 and its defective T&L unit, S3 Inc. withdrew from the graphics business. But on June 3, 2002, the newly founded company S3 Graphics, in cooperation with the later owner Via, tried it again: They launched the Savage XP, with a 166 MHz core clock and a 128-bit memory interface. Inside, however, is nothing more than a slightly revised Savage 2000 with a working T&L unit, and so this model cannot do anything against the superiority of the competition. The XP remains the last member of the Savage family from S3 – the next attempt is then called “Chrome”.

…2007: From the early 1990s through late 2006, the Pentium was the flagship of Intel’s desktop CPU fleet. However, that was over with the appearance of the Core 2 Duo, and the Pentium D, which was much too slow and inefficient, was quickly forgotten. On June 3rd, 2007 the old name was revived with the Pentium Dual-Core of the E2x00 series, which is based on the efficient core architecture with two cores. This time, however, the Pentium is no longer the top model: in future the name will only stand for the middle class.