Well, it’s been a long while since we heard something from Trident. It is about its graphics chips in the first place. As you remember, the last new product from Trident was Blade XP, which dates back to last May (to be more exact, April 2000). However, Trident couldn’t remain silent for ever. Today the company announced that they were starting the trial production of Blade XP4 chip intended for mobile PCs. And its specifications look quite impressive, we should say:

• 0.13micron manufacturing technology;
• 250MHz chip frequency;
• 3W maximum power consumption;
• 4 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs on each;
• Around 30 million transistors (which is very little for today);
• 128bit memory bus;
• DDR SDRAM support;
• Up to 666MHz memory working frequency;
• AGP 4x or PCI 2.2 interface;
• Hardware support of DirectX 8.1 (BrightPixel technology);
• DVI, CRT and TV-Out support;
• 2048x1536 maximum resolution;
• 1024x768 maximum TV-Out resolution;
• Hardware support of DirectX VA with Motion Compensation (MC) and IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform).

As you may notice, these specifications look even more attractive than those of the desktop Xabre chips (SiS330, see this news story), take for instance, full hardware support of DirectX 8.1. However, these are just paper specs now, and we don’t know if they really reflect the actual state of things. All in all, the most impressive XP4 feature is its low power consumption. It is a really great advantage for the mobile market. XP4 will be produced by UMC, which means that the recent news story about their 0.13micron production lines ready to go into operation is true.

The chip costs $39.95 for wholesale quantities. Also it can be shipped together with MCM (multi-chip-module) containing 16MB (XP4m16) or 32MB (XP4m32) of frame buffer memory. These modules cost $49.95 and $57.95 respectively. Unfortunately, Trident doesn’t report the shipping schedule for the new product. Bearing in mind Trident’s traditional slowness, this event is very unlikely to happen in the near future.

By the way, we wonder if Trident has already registered XP4 abbreviation as a trade mark? As SiS Company is selling its "illegally born" SiS645 chipsets this way avoiding some license fees.