Kyro II Ultra and Kyro III this year

The president of ST's Taiwanese subsidiary, Frederick Fu, spoke at Computex about ST's future plans with PowerVR technology. The recently released Kyro II should be refreshed in a few months, as one is used to with nVidia from the Ultra cards.

The new chip, called STG 4800, remains pin-compatible with the current Kyro II and enables clock frequencies of up to 200 MHz. On corresponding systems, ST could even succeed in overtaking the GeForce2 Pro cards from nVidia. However, the chip will continue to be manufactured using 0.18 µm technology. The PowerVR Series 4 is due to hit the market by the end of the year. The STG 5500 is to be completely redesigned and achieve 3 times the performance of the previous Kyro series. For the first time, the Kyro III also supports T&L and DDR-RAM up to 64 MByte on the hardware side. The chip also has 4 render pipelines, 2 more than the Kyro II, and is manufactured using 0.13 µm technology. Furthermore, several DACs will be integrated in the chip and it can handle iDCT to relieve the CPU load during DVD playback.