From: Steffen Seeger <s.seeger@physik.tu-chemnitz.de>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 09:41:52 +0100 (MET)

Re: STB and S3 tech specs

> It seems hard to believe that someone could reverse
> engineer something like a Permedia III in a very short time.

You don't have to reverse engineer the whole chip, but only the parts
where you are slower than the competition. And mostly you can make
'educated guesses' that give you the key idea behind some feature,
thus allowing you to re-implement it better. Given proper experience,
you can easily 'do it better' because you don't have such hard constraints
the original manufacturer had. (E.g. you don't have to care about
existing code-bases that have to be re-used).

> I come from the hardware side, funny thing is that it
> seems these video chip people are the ones that are so
> tight with the information.

No other PC-component is less standardized, evolves faster
(except CPUs, but here the key algotithms don't change that rapidly)
and allows room for innovation.

			Steffen

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